Forming part of con·stel·la·tions, the Cluster's publication series dedicated to mixed formats that emerge from the interplay of artistic and academic perspectives, Illegibilities Reflecting Reading engages with a broad range of questions to sound out the multifaceted effects and practices of reading. With a special focus on the fringes and margins of reading, the essays assembled in the volume address the practice not only as an automatic process of deciphering signs, of searching for and assigning meaning – they specifically highlight those moments when reading becomes a decidedly aesthetic practice, that is, one that is not instrumental but self-referential in sensory perception, poetic and/or performative, affective, interpretive, as well as experimental, transgressive and thus potentially political.

Reading, to name at least some of the dimensions reflected, is addressed as an embodied interaction with textual artefacts, as a basis for individual or collective performance, and as a practice of attention or even meditation that stands in an intimate relationship with writing; moreover, it is interrogated as a metaphor for understanding and interpreting the world, as well as a way of contesting the privileged and exclusionary mode of Western epistemology.