Reading is an everyday and, at the same time, strange, sometimes even magical practice – it produces something that cannot be derived from what is read alone. The act of reading is so automatic for literate users of writing that it is almost impossible to distinguish between seeing the forms of the written signs and deciphering them, between what is written and what is read. The transdisciplinary research project READING READING: IL/LEGIBLE responds to this difficulty by approaching reading from its absolute limit: the unreadable. The illegible exposes – albeit in the negative – the fundamental promise of writing to communicate, as well as its character as a potentiality dependent on actualisation by a reader. Thus, it makes reading as an aisthetic and semiotic practice accessible to reflection in a unique and productive way.

Thirteen scholars from the fields of literary studies, anthropology, philosophy and cognitive ethnology, as well as writers, visual artists, sound poets and translators, were invited to interrogate the practice of reading from their respective points of vantage to bring into view the wide variety of reading's dimensions – also and especially beyond the paradigm of information and mere communicative means. Many of these investigations resulted in essays, which are assembled in the publication Illegibilities Reflecting Reading. The essays address the practice of reading for example as an embodied interaction with textual artefacts and as a practice of attention that stands in an intimate relation with writing, or examine reading as a metaphor for interpreting the world, as well as a way of contesting the privileged and exclusionary mode of Western epistemology. Other explorations took the form of workshops, performances and visual works, which were presented at an event held at the daadgalerie in Berlin. Some of the outcomes, including a series of letters, a manual for reading the unreadable and a videopoem, are accessible below along with video impressions of the event.