#ArTEEtude 350 - Detlef Schlich returns to the beginning of his life in Ireland and reflects on his arrival in Lackavaun on the Northside of the Mizen Peninsula in 2003.
What if the house you bought was actually a time machine?
In 2003, I arrived in Lackavaun on the remote Northside of the Mizen Peninsula in West Cork.
No running water.
Old jeans stuffed between roof and wall to keep the wind out.
Rats upstairs.
Dunmanus Bay outside the door.
And then I met Pat McCarthy.
What initially appeared to be simply a remote and beautiful part of West Cork gradually revealed itself as a place in which several historical layers were still visible at the same time. Through the story of an old house without running water, the late arrival of rural electrification, dramatic population decline after the Great Famine, and the isolation of everyday life, the episode paints a vivid picture of a landscape that was already entering the 21st century while still carrying traces of a much older rural culture.
At the centre of the episode is Patrick McCarthy, co-author of Northside of the Mizen, who personally welcomed Detlef to Lackavaun in April 2003. McCarthy becomes a symbolic link between oral storytelling, local history and a disappearing way of life. An old butter churn, a curious matchmaking story, and the Irish tradition of the Pioneer movement open wider questions about how knowledge, gestures and memories survive once their original cultural context begins to disappear.
Rather than romanticising rural hardship, the episode examines the tension between poverty and authenticity, isolation and beauty, tradition and technological change. Schlich reflects on how these five years in Lackavaun shaped his later artistic engagement with ritual, material culture, shamanism, technology and media archaeology long before he had a theoretical language for it.
ArTEEtude 350 is a journey into a landscape full of traces — and into the stories that continue to live when someone decides to tell them again.
About Detlef Schlich
Detlef Schlich is a rock musician, podcaster, visual artist, filmmaker, ritual designer, and media archaeologist based in West Cork, Ireland.
His artistic practice moves between performance, photography, painting, sound, installation, film, music, podcasting, and digital image-making. Across these fields, Schlich reflects on the human condition, the relationship between ritual and technology, and the changing role of the artist in digital culture.
As a media archaeologist, he explores how media shape perception, memory, culture, politics, and artistic expression. His work often uses the figure of the digital shaman as an alter ego — a method for navigating the space between ancient ritual structures, contemporary media, and technological transformation.
Research & Artistic Method
Detlef Schlich’s artistic research is rooted in his essay Shamanism, Art and Digital Culture: Cause and Effect, which investigates the relationship between ritual, artistic transformation, media, and digital culture.
Download here for free:
Shamanism, Art and Digital Culture: Cause and Effect
Building on this foundation, Schlich developed Multilayerism: A New Paradigm in Contemporary Art – A Manifesto, an artistic method and conceptual framework for understanding contemporary art through layers of media, memory, technology, ritual, emotion, misunderstanding, and lived experience.
Read here:
Multilayerism: A New Paradigm in Contemporary Art – A Manifesto by Detlef Schlich
Together, these texts form the theoretical backbone of Schlich’s ongoing work as a visual artist, media archaeologist, ritual designer, musician, and host of the Arteetude podcast.
WEBSITE LINKS
Music Projects
WAW / Wild Atlantic Way
WAW is the music project by Detlef Schlich and Dirk Schlömer.
Official YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@WAWBand
From the forthcoming WAW album The Stories of Nil Young
Two songs from WAW’s developing album project The Stories of Nil Young form part of a mythopoetic journey along the Nile, where river, memory, loss, cooperation, and hope flow into music.
AfricaSmile follows the Nile as an imagined journey from its sources to the Mediterranean Sea — a river of memory, movement, rhythm, and myth. The song turns the meeting of the White Nile and the Blue Nile into a fragile image of cooperation. It is not a naïve peace anthem, but a wounded musical hope: two different currents meeting, listening, and still moving forward together.
Watch here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnQbsh01YWU
The Nile’s Bittersweet Song is the first official single by WAW / Wild Atlantic Way — Detlef Schlich and Dirk Schlömer.
The song follows the Nile as a river of memory, beauty, loss, and contradiction: a life-giver, but also a force that can take away what it once nourished. Through the story of Kamau, it becomes a poetic reflection on childhood, fragile hope, and the emotional landscape carried by a river that is both kind and cruel.
Inspired by East African storytelling traditions and shaped along the Wild Atlantic Way in West Cork, The Nile’s Bittersweet Song is a mythopoetic musical journey about water, grief, resilience, and the deep human longing to keep moving with the current.
Watch here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33AWko4IkKI
WAW on Bandcamp
Silent Night
In a world shadowed by conflict and unrest, Dirk Schlömer and Detlef Schlich felt compelled to reinterpret Silent Night to reflect the complexities and contradictions of modern life.
https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/silent-night
Wild Atlantic Way
This song emerged from a trip to West Cork, Ireland, where the beautiful coastal Wild Atlantic Way stretches along the west coast.
https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/wild-atlantic-way
YouTube
Silent Night Reimagined – A Multilayered Avant-Garde Journey by WAW aka Dirk Schlömer & Detlef Schlich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAbytLSfgCw
Detlef Schlich
I love West Cork Artists Group
YouTube Channels
visual Podcast
official Website
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