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Lawrence Dodd
Brokering Agency is a part-real, part-fiction, utopian agency based in an inconspicuous shop front at 214 Old Kent Road. Taking Robert Owen and the strong tradition of Utopian Socialism in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain as a starting point, it tells the story of how an estate agency became the temporary vehicle for a failed dream of a world beyond money.
Told through the mythic structure of ‘the hero’s journey’, Brokering Agency moves from a utopian ideal, to a real world of bills, debts, broken promises, depressions, and institutional pressures, to arrive back on the Old Kent Road, with one foot in the real, and a newfound capacity to see what’s already there.
A story of the tension between the real and the imagined, the utopian and the everyday, use and symbol, it speaks of the drab and predictable projections of futures that colonise our imagination; and of the struggle, amidst the crises we face, to enact a different world whilst trying to make sure we remember to brush our teeth in the morning. Brokering Agency is the product of a tension between an attachment to fixity and certainty, and the space of the unknown and contingent in which one must navigate to do anything at all. It’s about naive aspirations, failed ambitions and new perspectives.