Secret Mall Apartment: If These Walls Could Talk... Oh, Wait. They Do!
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-
Odd but meaningful, Secret Mall Apartment, is an entertaining documentary about how a group of eight young artists secretly maintained an apartment — from 2003 to 2007 — in a hidden nook in the Providence Place, Rhode Island, shopping center.
Director Jeremy Workman (Who is Henry Jaglom?, The World Before Your Feet) reconstructs the history of the project and reunites the five men and three women after 17 years to talk about how the project affected their lives. He even goes so far as to reconstruct the space, like a film set, so they can experience its cement block walls and thrift shop furnishings once again.
The secret living space artists created behind the walls of a Rhode Island mall.
The artists, mostly students in a Rhode Island School of Design summer program led by activist artist Michael Townsend, were inspired by an ad for the shopping center, when it opened in 1999. In it, a woman said she wished she could live at the mall because it had everything she needed.
The ad hit them personally. The mall, which pushed up local rents and promoted development in the area, had displaced the artists from their rundown artist-friendly neighbourhood. When they discovered an empty space of about 750 square feet between existing walls, they decided to claim it as their own.
They documented their experiences using a digital cheap camera bought at the Radio Shack, small enough to hold in an Altoids tin. During the day, they spent spare time trying on clothes they weren’t buying, watching movies at the mall cinema and scavenging meals from the food court.
What began as an art prank, intended to last a week, took on a life of its own. The artists didn’t live there fulltime. It functioned as a clubhouse where they occasionally slept over and treated as an art installation. They decorated the apartment, not with any sense of boho flair, but as a generic middle class pad, with a sectional sofa, matching floor lamps and a gaudy faux wood display cabinet.
Secret Mall Apartment sometimes feels like an extended short film, which loses some momentum when it digresses from its focus on the apartment to the group’s ringleader, Townsend. The other artists comment on his inspirational philosophy that art and life are inseparable. The film detours, chronicling Townsend’s public installations and temporary graffiti, using coloured tape, for decorating the walls of a children’s hospital, or creating anonymous memorials at the World Trade 9/11 memorial and at the site of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
When the apartment was discovered Townsend was the only apartment denizen punished. Like a shop-lifting teen, he was banned for life from the mall. Ironically, the ban has been lifted for the premiere of the film at the Providence Place cinema.
Secretl Apartment Mall also prompts a reconsideration of the social meaning of malls, which after a half-century of popularity, are in decline for several reasons, including over-building, online shopping, the COVID pandemic, and the decline of department stores in favour of big box stores.
These vast pseudo public spaces, replacing the city market and public streets, make their own rules regarding free speech, public assembly and the right to shelter. Anyone who has seen homeless people sleeping against the walls of an empty, heated shopping center on a winter’s night has to question these priorities.
Secret Mall Apartment. Directed by Jeremy Workman. With Michael Townsend, Adriana Valdez Young, Colin Bliss, James J.A. Mercer, Andrew Oesch, Greta Scheing, Jay Zehngebot, and Emily Ustach.
Secret Mall Apartment opens April 18 at Vancity, Vancouver, and Vic Theatre, Victoria May 2: Rio Theatre (Vancouver) Metro Cinema (Edmonton) TIFF Lightbox (Toronto) and other venues across Canada through May.