"The Reader" reconfigures the conventions of the detective story to imagine the viewer as a private investigator, ensnared in self-reflexive observation. The slide show combines a series of fragmented texts with a voiceover written by Cesarco and read by Lawrence Weiner. The sequences are forced to resemble a film, however, a story is never fully developed or explained. Rather, the texts narrate an account that betrays itself, generating paradoxes. The work does not try to tell a story (although it perhaps inevitably does), but rather concerns itself with a desperate attempt to reconstruct a story. It narrates an inevitable urge to make - what is seen, connoted, remembered - intelligible. "The Reader" was initially conceived as part of Cesarco's installation "The streets were dark with something more than night, or the closer I get to the end the more I rewrite the beginning," for which he was awarded the 2011 Baloise Prize at Art 42 Basel.