'The Return of the Dead Dogs' merges three images: the left-overs of a high school party; a place of worship; and a sleeping area in a haunting, nondescript environment. Its title was inspired by the name of a punk band in which I played as a teenager, when I lived in a squat in my hometown. When I was asked recently to provide a story about a place of residence which to this day holds some kind of special meaning to me, I once again wrote about this brief, but important period in my life.
On April Fools' Day, 1993, a group of friends and I moved into a derelict eighteenth century mansion in the centre of my hometown.
The house had been boarded shut for many years and was in a decrepit state. There were about six of us initially, but as word got round, pretty soon an endless stream of people started dropping by the house, looking for a place to stay; from German hippies to English punks and from potheads to heroin addicts.
As we had all agreed upon before moving into the house, its many spacious rooms were to be refurbished collectively and made into artist’s studios, music rehearsal rooms, and even a small theatre on a floor that housed a kind of stage, which had been decorated with strange symbols. In a dank bedroom I found an empty birdcage which had been knocked off its stand and now lay on the floor in a pile of white sand which had spilled from the bottom of the cage onto the carpet. The place was foul, and littered with bird droppings, but I remember being moved by the sight of the cage.
The dilapidated state of the house seemed to echo the lives and moods of its new inhabitants, and I remember feeling slightly out of place, as I was still attending high school and had moved in looking for adventure rather than out of necessity. Also, where others saw 'no future,' I knew I wanted to apply to art school eventually. And so while my housemates lived life with reckless abandon, I took a more conscious approach to living life on the margins of society. After a few weeks, several attempts to establish some kind of working roster had failed, and after a disastrous interview with a local radio station, which ended up in an argument with the show’s host, people began to lose interest in the project altogether. From its usual state of looking like 'the day after the party,' the situation quickly deteriorated. The designated main studio became a trash deposit; with bin bags piling up to the ceiling. The work on the many refurbishments remained unfinished. Boredom set in, and poverty, inertia, and alcohol and drug abuse put a strain on friendships. To make matters worse, the house was constantly getting broken into. There were several armed robberies, one of which saw my friends and I being held at gunpoint by two deluded men, one of whom had stabbed a huge pair of scissors through a bible, which he waved over his head maniacally. On another night one hysterical housemate pushed a huge kitchen table out of a fifth floor window, inadvertently crushing a chicken in the garden below. In the meantime, the city had started a legal procedure to evict us from the property, and as there was no one left who was willing to fight, we knew it was time to leave. The events I witnessed and the circumstances under which they occurred inspired me to create 'Return of the Dead Dogs' many years later.
Sebastiaan Schlicher was born in Roermond, the Netherlands, in 1975. After graduating from AKI, Enschede in 1999, he continued his studies at Wimbledon School of Art, London, where he received a postgraduate MA. In 2003 he was awarded an artist's stipend from the Dutch Fonds BKVB in Amsterdam. He currently lives in Berlin.