“We are (UN)REAL ESTATE AGENCY: if you think your dream of having a home is unreal we are here to make it real. If you think this agency is unreal, you will surprise yourself in discovering how close we are to reality. 

We are a fictional agency, though the real estate market is just as surreal. We propose unreal solutions to real problems. While real estate has stopped meeting the needs of people, we remain the only honest agency: totally, openly, unavoidably, unapologetically unreal”.

(UN)REAL ESTATE is an artistic project which explores the issue of housing crisis through an artistic methodology. The project aims to foster a public discussion, grounded in critical imagination, in order to raise awareness of the social, political, and economic mechanisms that lie at the root of the housing crisis.

The motivation behind the project is a personal observation of gradual transformation of the idea of house from a fundamental right, sanctioned in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, into a financial product. As journalist Sara Gainsforth argues, it is within our capitalist society that housing has become a privilege. The idea of housing as a right has disappeared from the realm of common sense: it stopped being claimed as a right, but increasingly perceived as something to be earned.

(UN)REAL ESTATE AGENCY is an imaginary real estate agency: unreal, precisely. It is an artistic intervention disguised as a commercial enterprise, deliberately blurring the line between fiction and reality. Three unreal estate agents invite audience to question whether the agency is real while offering a sharp critique of a housing system that has become so absurd it has lost any meaningful connection with reality.

Visitors entering the (UN)REAL ESTATE AGENCY browse a series of property listings that are surreal, but not entirely implausible. They get an unreal purchasing power, which they can use in different kinds of unreal auctions where whatever kind of situation can become an accommodation for sale. The dynamic to get a house is competitive, thought playful; and simultaneously reveals the structural contradictions and inequalities at the heart of today's housing system.

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