For Dejong, the city is a story that continually rewrites itself. He reads the city’s grid as poetry, line by line, sign by sign, finding meaning in unintended and accidental encounters. A glance shared between strangers, a patch of moss growing through concrete, a stone that seems to have forgotten its shape. These are all fragments lodged within the city’s narrative, its memory. As remnants of an almost silent presence, they keep on whispering. Dejong listens and gives a voice to what has not yet found language.

He walks, he scans, he finds, he loses. As he moves through the frayed edges of the city, he gathers coincidental moments that resist the prescribed narrative: graffiti, torn posters, faded lines and colors that have lost their origin. Each encounter questions a way of seeing; seeing becomes participating, and marking becomes remembering.

Urban spaces continuously shift and change. New observations are gathered without premeditation, inviting a different way of looking each time. Every permutational observation transforms the everyday into the mythical. His gaze drifts between the lines toward the unknown that still lingers, but might be on the verge of vanishing. These gathered observations become compositions, like a soft revelation infused with longing and expectation.

When we enter Dejong’s sphere, we encounter an interest that is archaeological and mythical, yet structurally modern, a dichotomy that is both analytical and spellbinding. It is a practice that emphasises different ways of seeing. One that provides a framework in which the transience of being gives space to something that transcends time.

Text: Humie Pourseyf