“Live at the mall. It seemed like a very absurd fantasy,” Michael Townsend — the de facto leader of a group of artists who lived, undetected, for four years in a shopping mall in Providence, Rhode Island — says at the top of Secret Mall Apartment. Directed by Jeremy Workman (Lily Topples the World) and produced by Jesse Eisenberg (A Real Pain), the documentary, now streaming on Netflix, premiered at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival. The story follows eight people who, from 2003 to 2007, gave new meaning to the term “mall rats.” Keep reading for more.
Workman’s documentary bounces between 20-plus-year-old footage of the group’s construction process — which they captured on a small point-and-shoot camera — and new interviews with those involved. Living at the mall, Townsend explains, “started as a response to development projects in our neighborhood.” In the early 2000s, developers began buying up land near the new Providence Place mall, displacing the artists who’d co-opted the existing buildings. In 2003, some of those artists — Townsend; his then-wife, Adriana Valdez-Young; and their friends Andrew Oesch and Jay Zehngebot — decided to fight back in their own way. It began as a sort of game: Who could stay inside the mall the longest without getting caught? Spanning 3.5 million square feet, the mall, which opened in 1999, had plenty to keep them busy. They’d hang out in the food court, try on clothes, and go to the movie theater. After some trial and error, they also found a place to sleep: an empty, 750-square-foot “nowhere space” in the bowels of the structure. “Maybe we have a responsibility to do something with it,” Townsend says in the film, reflecting on his thinking back then.
Local artists Colin Bliss, Greta Scheing, James Mercer, and Emily Ustach soon joined in, and, together, they made this liminal space into a home: They hefted furniture up precarious metal stairs, set up a television and a gaming system, filled the shelves with books and photo albums, and even built a wall with a lockable door. Constructing the wall required them to lug cinder blocks, one by one, to the living space, and they were caught during the process, marking their first real run-in with mall security — though it wouldn’t be their last.
All the while, they were mounting other art installations, using their time together in the secret apartment to plan them. “As a young person, it was super impactful to see [Townsend] living in a way that felt like all of it was the art — the secret apartment was the art, the teaching was the art, the interacting with other people was the art. All the stuff together is what makes life meaningful,” Bliss says in the doc.
“There’s something so pure about what they were doing,” Workman told The Washington Post last year. “Whether you think it’s dumb or profound, whatever, it’s so pure because they’re just doing it for the sake of doing it.”
You can watch Secret Mall Apartment on Netflix now to learn the full story.
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