Beginning in the late 1960s, the Argentinian conceptual artist Mirtha Dermisache (1940–2012) produced publications that consist of asemic writing: marks that resemble language but lack semantic content. Her artist’s books, letters and postcards challenge habitual responses to both art and literature, leading us to re-evaluate how language works, how we perceive it, and how it might be distinguished from drawing. This publication brings together three academic essays and an artist’s tribute, each offering a distinct approach to “reading” Mirtha Dermisache.

"Illegibilities Reflecting Reading" sounds out the multifaceted practices and effects of reading by focusing on reading from its absolute limit. The illegible exposes, albeit in the negative, the promise of writing to communicate, and makes reading as an aesthetic and semiotic practice accessible to reflection in a particular way. Just as reading can imply a wide range of processes, illegibility unfolds as a spectrum of failed or only partially successful decoding operations. The experience of illegibility as an unfulfilled expectation includes, for example, the fundamental unreadability of asemic graphisms, the potentially defeasible illegibility of coded texts, texts in unlearned sign systems or defaced writing, and the incomprehensibility of readable texts. By engaging with the fringes and margins of reading, the essays assembled in this 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 self-referential in sensory perception, performative, experimental, transgressive or political. Reading is investigated as an embodied interaction with textual artefacts, as a basis for collective performance or as a practice of attention, and as the privileged and exclusionary mode of Western epistemology. It is addressed in its intimate relationship with writing, and questioned as a metaphor for understanding and interpreting the world.