In 2003, a group of artists secretly moved into a 750-square-foot space in a large mall in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. They didn’t expect to stay more than a day, a week at most: The mall was upscale, the security robust, and the threat of being found and kicked out was ever-present. They stayed for four years.
The group lacked running water, relied on the mall’s public bathrooms, and couldn’t get mail delivered — but they turned a space originally littered with construction material into a home where they ate, slept, read, held meetings, watched TV, and played games on a Sony PlayStation 2. Their sanctuary remained until one day in 2007 when security officers busted in. Michael Townsend, the leader of the group and a pioneer of tape art, was arrested, charged with trespassing, and banned from the mall for life. The new feature-length documentary Secret Mall Apartment, directed by Jeremy Workman — which just premiered at the theater in that very mall this past weekend — unveils the full story for the first time.
Prior to this documentary, Townsend had denied more than 30 filmmakers who approached him. He and Workman first met in 2019 in Greece, when the latter was filming Lily Topples the World (2021) while the former was traveling for a tape art project. “I met Michael as an artist first,” Workman told Hyperallergic. “I didn’t meet him as the guy who snuck in, lived inside the secret apartment … that sort of stuck with me and stayed with me over the course of the entire production.” Workman’s perception of the mall apartment as an extension of Townsend’s art practice, rather than pure spectacle, won Townsend’s trust — as well as access to the 24 hours of video recordings that Townsend had kept on a Pentax Optio S4i for 17 years.
This personal video archive serves as the film’s spine, around which current-day interviews and other public archival materials weave. The low-res, handheld footage documents not only the process of constructing the apartment and their gatherings within it but also the streets, schools, and hospitals where the group’s other collaborative art projects took place, offering particular insight into their usage of tape to draw and facilitate interactions in public spaces. Like the mall apartment project, all of the collective’s other works have the quality of impermanence. For the “Hope Project” (2001), for example, the group sought to make about 500 life-size silhouette portraits of every fireman and airline passenger who died in the 9/11 attacks, arranged in the shape of four giant hearts across New York City’s streets. On the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing and the “Hope Mural” (1995), the tape artists traveled to Oklahoma City to work on “Week of Hope” (2005), a public wall memorial. They also collaborated with local schools, hospitals, and community centers to hold workshops and make art.
Was the mall apartment project a crime? A prank? A work of art — a durational performance, an interactive underground installation? A social experiment? A critique of consumerism, gentrification, or capitalism? “For [the artists] it’s like, sometimes it was a place where it was their living space; sometimes it was just a headquarters; but other times it was like this set,” Workman said. Though parts of the film can err toward overly sentimental, such as when the music crescendos while former collective members show their keys to the titular apartment at the end, its personal touch might be the best way to honor the integrity of the project — which was ultimately a secret shared between friends.
Secret Mall Apartment (2024), directed by Jeremy Workman, is screening at the IFC Center (323 6th Avenue, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) March 26–April 3.
