A really magical thing happens when you see a place (or places) you know and love on screen; you’re suddenly involved in a very different way. You might be sitting there wondering if the back of that yellow house is one you’ve walked by before, if you know one of the many artists or musicians being interviewed, or if you’ve actually driven by the parking lot door used by Michael Townsend and his crew of artists during their collective act of art and resistance. This was the experience my friend and I had when we went to see the documentary film, Secret Mall Apartment, (directed by Jeremy Workman and produced by Jesse Eisenberg) set in our very own Providence, RI. The film – complete with newsreels from the ’90s and 2000s, newspaper headlines from classic Providence papers, and raw footage filmed by the secret mall apartment residents themselves – centers on how something that Michael’s then-wife, Adriana Valdez Young thought of became a reality. She says early on, “I just had this idea…oh! We should live in the mall!” And that, they did. In fact, one of the best parts of seeing this documentary was sitting in the Providence Place Mall Cinema itself. I like to think that this band of merry artists referred to the movie theater as their extended living room, complete with an extremely “large screen TV” and snacks (popcorn seemed to be a favorite). It was all very meta, and possibly one of the reasons that the tale of this apartment, with its punk existence, its community art movement, and its teachings, moved me so much; I laughed, cried and just felt everything, the entire 90 minutes.
it was like I was eavesdropping on the emergence, planning, and execution of a fabulous and subversive caper involving eight artists (whose identities had never before been revealed). In actuality, even before the idea, (or what Michael describes as an “absurd fantasy and a great challenge”) was uttered, this artist and teacher- had a visit from the fates (from my perspective). He was on one of his daily runs while the mall was being built, when he noticed a spot that he couldn’t figure out a use for (partly it seems, because of the mall’s unique curvature). This area, “underutilized space” that the artists felt compelled to “develop,” eventually became the secret apartment with an actual cinder block wall and a working door with a lock and key! I SAW this on screen and I still can’t believe it. And, while some of the most suspenseful and entertaining moments in the film have to do with how this group of people crawled through and around a building, escaped being caught despite a constant and annoyingly loud alarm, and eventually turned this forgotten space into a furnished and liveable, almost cozy home – it was the reflection on this city’s history (good and bad), the ownership of white privilege, and the purpose of public art – that impacted me the most. Now, you might be asking yourselves, why do this? What was the motivation behind it? As always, I don’t want to give too much away, but the artists were responding to the “Providence Renaissance,” the gentrification occurring in the late ’90s that manifested in neighboring communities as displacement and disregard. The construction of the Providence Place Mall had actually turned it into a “cultural enemy” of sorts. “We all hated the mall when it went up, right? It was infuriating, instead of putting the money into downtown in general, supporting the businesses that were already here, they built that monstrosity, we hated it,” says Lizzie Araujo Haller, former director of the Providence Department of Art, Culture, Tourism.
As I sat in the dark and watched this caper continue to unfold I audibly gasped when I heard revelatory comments about this so-called monstrosity’s design. “There were no entrances for us [the residents of Olneyville], all of the entrances were on the East Side” says Townsend. It “drew a line between premium Providence and the historically excluded Providence,” remarks Adriana. I gasped once more during the next scene: a white woman giving her opinion on the benefits of the mall, talking about the better clientele that will be attracted.. I immediately wrote in my notes, “That’s code for white people.” The impact of these decisions, the placement of the mall, the location of the entrances, who was involved in or excluded from the process, the people experiencing harm as a result, was the catalyst for the creation of the secret apartment. It’s “such a magic thing to take a space from the mall,” says one of the artists, Greta Scheing. Another factor to note is the interaction of the project with white privilege. One of the artists says on camera, “My fear for my bodily integrity is not the same…” recognizing the “shield” of whiteness that allowed Michael, for example, to convince a security guard of his innocence while he and others moved hundreds of cinder blocks from a vehicle into the mall. The linking of wobbly home-video-esque footage (filmed using hand-held cameras back in the day), with present-day interviews, really gave me a sense of how the younger and older versions of the protagonists must have felt about their 750 square feet of living protest art. This formative experience continues to influence them and encompasses a shared tenet: “life as art, art as life.”
For Michael, life and art are one and the same, and in their work together, these artists sought to accurately represent lived experience – elicit empathy, honor the ephemeral nature of life, and capture the power of collective art-making– all to facilitate connection and healing. Jay Zehngebot explains that, “The apartment was the side project to the other,” meaningful art the team created. Colin Bliss, another of the artists, reflects on this work,saying they were “a little elite strike force team of empathetic artists…” That, they were – and it was this raison d’ê·tre that was the most moving. In the documentary film, Secret Mall Apartment (winner of the 2024 SXSW Documentary Spotlight Audience Award) there is no separation between life and art. Instead, there is a collective experience of healing and resistance being depicted in the true story of eight artists and their work in the mall and beyond, and being felt by the viewer. I highly recommend it, and was overjoyed by the twist ending. •
Want to know more or figure out if you can find that parking lot door, go to: secretmallapartment.com
