Access the properties and views you can’t afford and see the city from inside its most exclusive spaces!
ASSET ARREST is a project and podcast series that enters the exclusive spaces of financialized housing. ASSET ARREST explores the various forms of financialized housing and their impact upon urban, global and local space, long standing communities, and the very meaning of community. ASSET ARREST poses as a potential buyer/renter in order to access the world of luxury real estate.
Fed up with seeing the area you lived in swallowed up by “luxury” property developments masquerading as homes? Always wanted to step inside the properties that are sold as “investment opportunities” and see what they actually look like for yourself? Fancy a fresh perspective on the city, or want to challenge the sales pitch of estate agents?
ASSET ARREST is an estate-agent-agent that handles the process of arranging viewings of properties you have no intention of buying. ASSET ARREST has over five years’ experience of viewing such properties and will make the process easy, fun, and hassle free for you, banishing the anxiety, fear, and discomfort you might otherwise feel in entering these spaces. As well as occasionally running private tours that members of the public can sign up to, ASSET ARREST regularly invites guests to attend viewings, with each viewing being published as a podcast episode. For each episode, I record a conversation with my guest before and after our viewing, constructing an image of the property in question through words and reactions rather than the usual shiny CGI renderings. ASSET ARREST has so far viewed properties in London, Newcastle, Berlin, and Guangzhou, and will continue to enter these spaces wherever it ends up.
Laura Yuile is an artist from Glasgow and currently based in London, UK. Her multidisciplinary practice explores the entanglements between domestic and urban space through matters of community, sustainability, and obsolescence, and the effects of globalisation and technological development. She has exhibited and screened internationally at venues including Kunstraum Kreuzberg (for Transmediale 2021, Berlin); Science Gallery (London); nGbK (Berlin); TACO! (London); Apexart (New York); The Blackwood Gallery (Toronto); Recent Activity (Birmingham); Tate Britain (London); Mauve (Vienna); t-space (Milan) and Collective (Edinburgh). She has undertaken residencies with ZK/U: Centre for Art and Urbanistics (Berlin); Inside Out Art Museum (Beijing), Temporary Art Platform (Beirut), The Art House (Wakefield); The White Building (London) and was a 2017 recipient of the Red Mansion Award Residency (Beijing). She has an MFA from Goldsmiths University (London, 2017), a BFA from The Glasgow School of Art (Glasgow, 2008), and in 2015 was an Associate Artist with Open School East (London). Alongside gallery-based exhibitions and events, she has organised a number of projects that filter into the everyday, commercial spaces that her work is engaged with. These have included Comfort Zones – a series of symposia on the subject of comfort zones held in the showrooms of various IKEA stores through the UK and China (2013–14), and a bus tour to a landfill site for Global Shadow Local Mist (2014). She is currently completing an AHRC funded practice-based PhD at Northumbria University on different forms of financialized housing; the social, political and economic structures that turn them into ‘gated’ communities; and strategies we might employ towards ‘ungating’ them.
My practice fluctuates between installations of objects and videos that are situated within gallery spaces, and projects such as ASSET ARREST that intervene in the commercial spaces that my work and research is concerned with. I view such interventions as a form of critical spatial practice in that they appropriate private and exclusive space for other uses by finding an opening to exploit. In the case of ASSET ARREST, I call the strategy employed ungating, and this is a term I apply to various projects and practices that utilise openings in seemingly closed-off spatial constructs towards imagining and making something else.
Alberto Duman, Music for Masterplanning, (2016), Newham, London.
https://albertoduman.wixsite.com/music-masterplanning
Focus E15’s occupation of the Carpenter’s Estate, 2014, Newham, London.
https://focuse15.org/e15-open-house-occupation/
Cassie Thornton, Desperate Holdings Real Estate & LandMind Spa, (2019), Oakland, California.
http://feministeconomicsdepartment.com/desperate-holdings-real-estate-landmind-spa/
