All rights reserved: @Mariejon de Jong-Buijs, 2024
Project Description iExist
iExist is a long-term, serial project I began in 2016. Every morning, immediately after waking, I take a photograph with my smartphone from the same window, capturing the outside world exactly as it appears in that moment—framed, repetitive, and unpopulated. This act became a daily ritual, a way of marking time through a fixed gaze, while the world beyond the glass shifts in light, season, and weather. There are no people in the images, no visible trace of my private life, yet each picture is also a kind of presence—a statement: I exist.
What began as a personal practice in Basel became a sustained inquiry into time, repetition, and selfhood. My smartphone, more than a tool, acted as both camera and confessor—a collaborator and witness. Through its lens, ordinary window views took on a quiet strangeness. Each image offered a moment of shared solitude and reflection, blurring the line between private and public. This daily rhythm—look, capture, post—formed a visual archive of presence without showing the self. It is a self-portrait by other means.
Developed over five years and across two continents, iExist took shape during a period of personal dislocation and global upheaval. The Covid-19 pandemic intensified the project’s underlying themes: the dissolution of boundaries between analog and digital, public and private, presence and absence. With each image, I began to ask: Can identity be expressed through what is not shown? Can daily images, devoid of the self, still function as self-portraiture?
These questions became especially urgent when the act of posting transformed from private ritual to public performance. I initially began sharing images on Instagram in 2018, with a one-year delay between the photo and the post. Later that year, I began posting in real time. This shift marked a deeper transformation: the act of sharing became part of the work itself. Each image—though quiet and empty—became a kind of selfie. A portrait made through insistence.
As a painter at heart, this project led me into unfamiliar territory: photography, social media, installation, seriality. Still, the logic of my painting practice remains embedded—especially in the repetitive gesture, the attention to framing, and the connection to lived experience. My Dutch roots, shaped by agricultural labor and an embedded sense of “placed-ness,” continue to inform the way I observe and record the world. When it became difficult to paint plein air due to lockdowns, iExist became my new ground. The window replaced the field. The act of looking became the act of painting.
Time is a central concern. iExist shares affinities with the work of artists like On Kawara and Tehching Hsieh, who used duration and repetition to mark presence. Like them, I explore time as material. But where their bodies often appear as evidence, mine is absent. iExist is a portrait through withdrawal. Through the act of showing up, I mark myself—without ever being seen.
For me—also a mother, part-time worker, and spouse—iExist is a daily return, a stabilizing gesture. It resonates with Anne Truitt’s Diary, where writing became her anchor, and with Cézanne’s lifelong drawings from an écorché—a steady practice connecting art and life. Repetition here is not mere habit; it is devotion. It is resistance to disappearance.
As of November 24, 2025, iExist will comprise 1,827 photographs. It is structured not as a narrative, but as a series of accumulated gestures. It asks what it means to exist through time, to see without being seen, to frame the world and thereby place oneself within it.
Basel CH, 2025
Mariejon de Jong-Buijs