Alien, Ghost

• 1 Prologue (Their language in my mouth)
• 2 Refuge
• 3 Speaking of war (Knowledge production)
• 4 Trauma-informed
• 5 Fear like honey (Drifting off)
• 6 Walk it out

We appear out of nowhere, equipped with badges, licences, a foreign tongue. We are on the odd mission of recording what we see and reporting back to distant audiences. Letting in much, saying little. We don’t like to think of ourselves as bureaucrats, but our speech is scripted, an alphabet soup of jargon and abbreviations. There are armies of us everywhere. Our task: witness regimes fall, revolutions, war; report back in dispassionate, well-combed sentences. Perform expert understanding and control. We linger, often for too long to remain outsiders. Long enough to be tormented by what we see. Certainly long enough to be aware of the meagreness of what we can do. Are we even real? Are we really there? Do we succeed in haunting distant consciences with our reports, analyses, films, sector assessments?

Alien, Ghost is a series of audio meditations on the dilemmas of witnessing and complicity. Through a series of portrait sketches, soundscapes, wartime dreams and personal reflections of working as an anthropologist in Ukraine in wartime, it captures the disorientation and rage of being a contemporary in crisis. It confronts the mountains of linguistic debris, reports, memos, analyses we produce to channel the raw reality of war onto desks in courts, news headlines, ministries, and academic journals. It asks what is going on at the margins of this work, how we make home in the in-between, walk out the grief, guilt and anger in foreign cities, navigate our fragmented lives, finding ourselves changed beyond recognition.

Copyright © Diána Vonnák and Bálint Haller, 2026. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations, this text, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without written permission from the rights holder. No part of this text may be used for AI training datasets, machine learning, or any automated data collection without the author's prior written permission Text: Diána Vonnák Music and sound design: Kin Teal

Written and produced for the exhibition Vessel & Voyager, part of the Junge Akademie program of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.