Stumbling Matters

Abstract

The stumbling matters in question here are the embedded results of the art project Stolpersteine ('stumbling blocks'), instigated by the Cologne artist Günther Demnig (2020). The stumbling blocks are small squares of concrete, 10 by 10 centimetres, covered with a brass plate and installed in the pavement in front of the last address of particular victims persecuted or murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Since starting in the early 1990s, nearly 70,000 stumbling blocks have been installed in more than twenty-five countries, including Norway where the choreographer and artist-researcher Per Roar lives. In his neighbourhood in Oslo, he stumbles across these blocks every day. This experience led to the making of the artistic research and performance project Stumbling Matters, on which this article builds, and to Karen Barad and her interest in the entanglement of matter and meaning (Barad 2007, 2014). In this article Per Roar discusses the affective and social choreography embedded in the stumbling blocks through questioning what they are producing and what the encounters with them perform. In the void between his everyday life, the terror and atrocities committed and the individual people – the victims who would have remained unknown and forgotten if not for being named on the stumbling blocks 7ndash; he argues that the blocks, as material objects, perform and that stumbling matters.