the graveyard of memories

Written by Weston Teruya

In The Graveyard of Memories, a loosely interconnected short film, series of photographic portraits, and sculptural installations, Tariq Stone imagines the speculative history of our discarded objects. Through these lushly captured vignettes, he asks us to consider the paths our trash charted before it ended up in the waste pile. What is the emotional life of our things?

In his film, Juno, Stone’s deeply empathetic, titular character can only experience life through the echoes of others’ memories that she psychometrically calls forth from the trash she finds strewn about. The liveliness of some of these recollections contrasts with the melancholic detachment Juno experiences by only living lives that aren’t her own. As we see her recount and move through these object histories, all characters, even in photographs, are played by the same performer, reinforcing her supreme loneliness even in a world filled with people and their thoughts. Stone’s photographic series gives us another angle on these material stories, depicting densely staged, surrealist scenes of other people engaging with their couches, clocks, tubs, childhood play sets, and TVs. In these, we’re asked to unpack and reconstruct the potential narratives from the assembled costumes, symbols, and characterisation, paralleling Juno’s inner journey.

By inviting us to dive deep into the memory of things, to consider the roles they play in our day to day life, Stone challenges us to engage with our world of stuff–and the people around us–with more care and intention. As we can see in Juno’s narrative, this doesn’t mean swinging toward hyperconsumption or object fetishism. For the most part, the trash Stone has chosen are not heirloom items that we pass between generations. Instead, his imagined world tasks us with a kind of mindful stewardship that might temper our tumbling rush toward a numb, disposable culture focused on extraction.