Chris Duncan
Secret Mall Apartment places the audience in the early aughts as the city of Providence, Rhode Island grappled with change at the outset of the twenty-first century. The Providence Place mall was an enormous project that seemed to set the stage for a complete transformation of the city into a more modern, prosperous place. but the birth of the “new” Providence meant, inevitably, the death of the old one, and the nigh destruction of many of the city’s oldest areas, and their replacement with commercial space like Providence Place itself. With the titular secret mall apartment, however, the artists firmly staked their claim on the city, and made a bold statement that the forces of development and commercialism might challenge them in profound ways, but it couldn’t get rid of them forever. The film documents their journey, and invites reflections on it and its implications for all of us.
As the film illustrates, east of the mall, across I-95 along the Woonasquatucket river, was home to an area of old historic mill sites called Eagle Square. These buildings were mostly abandoned–officially at least, because unofficially, they were home to artists, musicians, and various other adherents of the lifestyle Michael Townsend, one of the artists at the center of the film, describes as “no routine, but a great sense of purpose.” It was a place where these artists were, as they themselves describe in the film, free to create and perform as they pleased in community with each other.
But they were squatters, and they couldn’t stay forever. The artists were kicked out and Fort Thunder was torn down to build more commercial space, so they needed somewhere to go. As they shuffle around Providence, they begin to spend lots of time at the mall, at first challenging themselves to basically live there for an entire week. They do this, and continue to explore until they find a large, empty, abandoned space with enough room for an entire apartment. The rest is history.
Most of the artists who spent time in the mall apartment—of whom there were eight in total, including Townsend—were students at the Rhode Island School of Design who studied under Townsend, who was clearly the leader of the group and is the most heavily featured in the film. Many of them remark that Townsend opened up their sense of what they were capable of creatively by really challenging them to examine the reasons they create art and what they really wanted out of the creative process.
Many of them, too, worked with Townsend to make tape art—large murals out of tape. The artists did these murals at a children’s hospital in Providence, as well as at the memorial of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, where Townsend made a mural in the immediate aftermath of the building’s bombing, and the entire team of eight returned on the tenth anniversary of the bombing to create another mural. They also made them all around Manhattan with the Hope Project, making tape silhouettes of people who died on September 11, 2001 and in its aftermath.
The hospital, specifically the Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, is where the artists made most of their tape art. They did this for no money, and were usually rewarded with just a free lunch in exchange for their work. Nevertheless, the hospital’s former healing arts director praises the project in the film, and describes its impact in engaging patients by engaging them in the present and giving them a sense of control over their space—more likely than not, a space they otherwise do not want to be in.
The secret apartment represents the exact same thing; these artists had seen their neighborhood destroyed and their free-spirited lifestyle facing an existential threat, so this empty, abandoned space in the middle of the huge, ugly mall that they hated represented for them a way of reclaiming their ownership of the city. The film poses politicians, developers, and the mall itself as part of a nebulous force of change (which the artists, as Young notes, are not opposed to on its face, but simply opposed to because of what the direction of change actually was) and destruction. Thus, this absurd makeshift domestic space was, for the artists, an act of creation out of the rubble of their old world. The fact that it was something they successfully hid for so long, and maintained right under the nose of mall staff, made it all the more righteous in their eyes.
The film does note that the artists were not literally homeless—Townsend and Adriana Valdez Young, who were married when they first began creating the apartment, in fact share a scene where they essentially debate the merits of spending their weekends working on the mall apartment versus working on their actual house.
This is to say that they did, in fact, have a house. But it is also to say that the mall apartment was their, or at least Townsend’s, home in a more spiritual sense. He remarks that the apartment is a home to him in the sense that it is a domestic physical space, but also a place that brings him into contact with people he likes and cares about—what might be considered his “found” family.
The aforementioned “scenes” reflect the fact that so much of this film is constructed from footage that the artists took themselves during their times at the mall, using tiny Pentax Optio cameras—which, they note, were literally small enough to fit in an Altoids tin—to shoot video and take pictures. The film mostly cuts back and forth between this footage and interviews with the artists. The stark visual contrast between the past and present solidifies the sense of the mall, and the mall apartment, as a kind of lost age. It also betrays a jarring lack of real visual cohesion that makes the film often feel much more dull when it is not showing old footage. The very clean look of the present-day footage feels quite dry compared with the vigor of the past. Just as the film hops back and forth between the artists and their younger selves, it seems to bounce between a youthful excitement and a more measured, tragic sense of reflection.
It is fascinating to see a story like Secret Mall Apartment in our current day, where surveillance technology has penetrated everyday life to complete and utter ubiquity. Furthermore, as the process of gentrification evolved over the course of the twenty-first century so far, issues of growing homelessness and its widespread criminalization come to mind. The film does pay lip service to points of privilege such as the artists’ whiteness and their belief that it helped them escape scrutiny after a documented run-in with mall security while they were hauling cinder blocks up to the apartment.
This is an important piece of context to acknowledge, but it also does not quite reckon with the kind of privilege that the film really evokes. With a contemporary frame of reference, one might easily think of this secret apartment as a kind of performance of poverty or homelessness.
Clearly the artists did not see the apartment in this light; many of them reflect on their desire not to perform poverty in any way or pretend they were anything other than themselves, but to essentially create a place of absurd, heightened domesticity. There was clearly an ironic sensibility to the apartment as a project, but it wasn’t mocking or mean-spirited. It was an embodiment of Townsend and co.’s approach to life as intertwined with their art. This space, where they remark that they often slept four to five nights a week, i.e. most of the time, was both their home and their personal statement.
One naturally wonders whether it is possible to keep a secret like Secret Mall Apartment’s in a place like Providence now. For the most part, the scene from which these artists emerged is dying across American cities as the cost of living has skyrocketed. Furthermore, the rise of the modern surveillance state and the persistent brutalization of homeless populations in those same cities means that the will and means exists to snuff out anything akin to this project where it might pop up. But, oh, to be able to live like this again, with so little routine, but so great a sense of purpose, with a community and family by one’s side at all times. It may be the fullest, and freest, way to live that exists.
