Secret Mall Apartment

Filmmaker Jeremy Workman has a history of documenting obsessive behavior: the guy determined to walk every street of New York City’s five boroughs in The World Before Your Feet, the domino artist prodigy painstakingly positioning countless blocks in Lily Topples the World. You don’t have to squint to spy an obsessive streak powering the subjects of his latest documentary, Secret Mall Apartment, who spent four years converting a forgotten space in the bowels of a Providence shopping mall into a fully furnished 750 square foot apartment.

There were eight artists and friends involved in the secret project, but one in particular, Michael Townsend, emerges in the documentary’s telling as the leader. Using a mix of archival footage from the early 2000s and contemporary one-on-one interviews with each of the participants, Secret Mall Apartment recounts the scheme from when it was first a glimmer in Townsend’s mind. He recalls first watching the construction of the Providence Place Mall – embraced by some in the community as much-needed revitalization, scorned by others as a harbinger of doom – and noticing a weird pocket of dead space. Once the mall was built, he and his friends went poking around until they found the space, then set about making it their own, smuggling in a sofa, a curio cabinet, a dining table, a coffee table, a Playstation, and even their own door with a functioning lock.

Smuggle is the word for it: You think you’re watching a sparky doc about a glorified prank, but Workman – and certainly the artists behind the mall project – do have weightier matters in mind, like gentrification, the value in impermanent art, and the armor of whiteness that allowed the group to go unchallenged by security for so long. In addition to the riveting tick-tock of how they found the space and made a home of it, Secret Mall Apartment expands to touch on other collaborative art projects Townsend and his friends initiated, including tape art graffiti in a children’s hospital and 9/11 memorials around New York, operating, as one of the participants puts it, as “an elite strike force team of empathetic artists.” There’s a whole world to unpack in that perfect distillation – about how uplifting, even wholesome these artists come off, and also the level of commitment (even monomania?) they, and especially Townsend, devote to the principle of “life as art, art as life.” Secret Mall Apartment – a seriously fun film – commits in kind.