When the attempt to translate something into sound and meaning fails or is only partially successful, it is usually called 'illegible'. It can be frustrating to be confronted with indecipherable signs or potentially crackable codes, defaced writing or text that remains incomprehensible. But it can also prove highly productive, for it is precisely the unfulfilled expectation of legibility that enables new ways of thinking about reading itself. Illegibilities Reflecting Reading sounds out reading as an aesthetic, semiotic and epistemic practice by focusing on its absolute limits. By engaging with experiences of illegibility, the essays in this volume address reading, for example, as an embodied interaction with textual artefacts, as an exercise in attention, as a privileged mode of Western epistemology, or as a metaphor for understanding and interpreting the world.

This publication is the product of a collaboration between the EXC 2020 research project Reading Reading. On an Aesthetic Practice by Barbara Bausch and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. In the summer of 2024, a group of scholars and artists from various fields were invited to the transdisciplinary exploration READING READING: IL/LEGIBLE to reflect on the multifaceted practice of reading. By examining an illegible artefact, each of them began to engage with reading as a practice that is not only instrumental but self-referential in sensory perception, affective, experimental, performative, transgressive and potentially political. Preliminary results, in the form of essayistic reflections, visual works or concepts for workshops and performances, were discussed in a colloquium at the Cluster in October 2024. Following the exchange, the essays were readied for publication in the EXC 2020 publication series 'con·stel·la·tions' (Textem Verlag); the visual, participatory and performative contributions were presented as READING READING ROOM in March 2025 at daadgalerie in Berlin and can soon be explored online.

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Barbara Bausch, Jessica Barr, Charlotte Coch, Ulrike Draesner, Sharon Howe, Angélica Freitas, Raisa Inocêncio Ferreira Lima, Elias Kreuzmair, Karolin Meunier, Michael T. Taussig, Nhã Thuyên, Kinga Tóth and Sarah Bro Trasmundil. Illegibilities Reflecting Reading. con·stel·la·tions 3. Hamburg: Textem Verlag, 2025 (open access).