SXSW 2024: Secret Mall Apartment is an ode to art, community, and imagination

Photo by Michael Townsend

As an elder millennial, I often think I missed out on a lot. I’ve mostly been present for the ends of things I hoped to experience as an adult—namely a stable job market that would let me pursue my desired career, and an economy that could support that dream—not the beginnings of movements I could join. When I hear stories about communities of artists, writers and filmmakers building something incredible and spontaneous from the ground up, I mostly feel jealousy, not inspiration. 

In this regard, Jeremy Workman’s Secret Mall Apartment is unique in movies of its kind. It depicts perhaps the last gasp of DIY art culture in the midst of an otherwise fun film about a group of artists creating an unlikely haven for themselves. It’s a combination nostalgia trip and middle finger to the systems that have slowly eroded the viability of a full-time creative life. 

It’s also a delightful story about building a clandestine apartment in an unused space in a shopping mall with your friends. You bring to the experience what you will, I guess.

In the early 2000s, artist and Rhode Island School of Design instructor Michael Townsend invited friends and former students to participate in a wild art project. The sprawling Providence Place mall, which four years earlier had displaced Townsend and his fellow artists from the warehouse district they called home, promised shopping convenience and amenities galore—so many, in fact, that shoppers might never want to leave. What if Townsend and his motley crew took that literally and moved right in?

Photo by Michael Lisnet

Within a week, Townsend and his then-wife, Adriana Valdez-Young, found the perfect spot to camp out: an approximately 750-square-foot cavern squished between two wings of the building and accessible via a network of crevices and service hallways. Over the next four years, the team of eight young artists gradually turned it into a living space without any mall employees knowing. They brought in Salvation Army furniture and jerry-rigged the place with extension cords for lighting, a TV and even a PlayStation, and eventually built their own locked entry.

Secret Mall Apartment benefits hugely from the artists’ own footage of the project, recorded on cheap lo-res digital cameras that adds to the movie’s overall raggedy charm. We get to watch the team lift furniture—including a full china cabinet!—up a narrow service ladder, and see them evade mall security on a number of occasions (blessedly, the artists are quick to note their whiteness is a big reason they got away with any of this).

Workman also shows these artists’ projects outside of the mall apartment, which often depict a sense of wonder and discovery that doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. Townsend likes working in hidden spaces; part of the film explores a site installation he did under a railroad bridge in Providence prior to the mall apartment, with human figures suspended in a complicated webs of criss-crossed wire and string. It was an unsanctioned, unadvertised piece that could only be found if you knew where to look. Unsurprisingly, that installation has since been destroyed.

During all this, the movie also considers the real-life concerns that make combining art and life difficult to pursue. We see, for instance, the moment that Townsend and Valdez-Young’s relationship seems to hit the breaking point. He’s excited about spending the weekend decorating the mall apartment; he wants to install flooring and get more furniture. She would like to spend the weekend working on their actual home, not the satirical facsimile of domestic life they’ve created. Townsend moves on as if it’s already decided, but the camera stays on Valdez-Young’s unhappy face.

All this contributes to a sense that Secret Mall Apartment depicts a scene at the beginning of its end, and it’s emblematic of similar stories in communities around the world. Post 9/11, it became increasingly difficult to find unpoliced, undeveloped spaces where communities of outsiders and artists could build something organic together. These days, anyone who tries quickly gets priced out or threatened by encroaching projects that promise to bring “vitality” to a city without consulting the people whose community they’re attempting to erase (is this a veiled statement about the Royals stadium project? You betcha).

This might seem like a lot of meaning to put on a movie about friends pulling off a four-year art stunt, but it’s all right there. Secret Mall Apartment is a breezy, affectionate movie, but it also has a lot on its mind that’s worth paying attention to. If nothing else, it’ll get you to reconsider how we value art and creativity, and the people who work hard to make the world a more interesting place.