Helder Da Rocha Pereira Joins the No Stone Tombstone Project

IWBFD Studios welcomes Helder Da Rocha Pereira — Chief Creative Officer at Unloop and a specialist in interactive storytelling for real-world spaces — to the No Stone Tombstone project, the initiative led by IWBFD's Paul J. J. Kang to rethink what a city does when it runs out of room for its dead.

When the Dead Refuse to Leave

In Porto, a grave is leased for three years. When the lease ends, the remains are exhumed so the plot can be used again. But between 2006 and 2015, 55–64% of first exhumations uncovered bodies that had not decomposed — some mummified — jamming the city's burial-recycling system and trapping families in endless two-year reburial cycles with no resolution.

And this is not a Portuguese quirk; it is the European baseline. London, Berlin, Athens, Paris, Rome, and Naples all lease and reuse graves on the same assumption — that a body decomposes on schedule. Porto is simply the front row, where that assumption breaks.

No Stone Tombstone: A New Answer

No Stone Tombstone pairs a New York idea with a Japanese machine. Once a lease ends, remains are processed and sealed in standardized urns inside a consecrated underground vault, retrieved by automated systems modeled on Japan's robotic columbariums.

A memory layer then moves remembrance off the land and into time: families authenticate at networked street poles to reach private digital memorials — a portrait, a recorded voice, a virtual candle. Final processing follows a fire path (cremation) or a water path (alkaline hydrolysis), routed through a consecrated loop that honors Church doctrine. Memory occupies time, not land.

What Helder Brings

As Chief Creative Officer at Unloop, Helder Da Rocha Pereira designs interactive creative for real-world spaces — precisely the craft No Stone Tombstone needs to turn a vault, a street pole, and a digital memorial into one dignified experience for the living.

We are honored to have him on the team.

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Read the full story behind the project: When the Dead Refuse to Leave

More on Helder's work: Unloop