At the turn of the millennium, Michael Townsend spent five years as a drawing instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, but unbeknownst to his colleagues, during that time, he and seven other artists were working on something unbelievable. Inspired by a 2003 radio advertisement for the then-new Providence Place Mall in which a woman expressed her excitement about the shopping center’s opening and how it would allow her to get everything that she needed for her life in one place and expressing a desire to “live in the mall,” Townsend set about finding out if this would be possible. Over the next few years, he and several others, including fellow Providence-based artists and even a few of his students, managed to locate an unused vacant space within the mall itself and, over time, turned the 750 square foot “void” into a (mostly) habitable space, before being discovered by the mall’s powers that be and being evicted. In the nearly two decades since, the others who assisted in making the mall their home have remained unnamed—Townsend is no narc—but recently participated in the creation of Jeremy Workman’s most recent documentary, Secret Mall Apartment. 

I was intrigued by the premise, but I didn’t expect to be moved by the film. On social media recently, I saw someone calling out the documentary Waiting for Superman as being propaganda for charter schools and denouncing the way that contemporary critics had been too kind to it. This led into a discussion about documentaries that included a quotation about how a documentary that does not improve one’s knowledge about the subject more than reading an article about it is one that should be met with criticism. (With James Gunn’s upcoming Superman film, you can imagine that even with boolean additions, searching for “waiting for superman” was a futile endeavor in trying to find this discussion again.) Secret Mall Apartment is much more than that, weaving together a tale of a group of artists in opposition to gentrification, as well as a more subtle narrative about the ephemeral nature of art, that its beauty (like our lives) are meaningful not because of permanence but because of impermanence. Nowhere is this more clearly made evident than the section of the film which focuses on Townsend (and his students)’s work with in tape art, as instruction (as we see Michael teaching a class of students about using masking tape as a kind of temporary graffiti), as installation (as seen when the camera tours the Hasbro Children’s Hospital and all of the art there that was made by and in collaboration with patients), and as memorial (when Townsend and some of his students spend half a decade creating silhouettes all over Manhattan in the shape of four superimposed hearts). 

It’s the last of these that’s the most transitory, as even the website that was used to document this project is now defunct. (When this was noted during the documentary, I wondered if this was true and if the website was really gone, but even when checking the WayBack Machine’s archive, all of the pages I could find looked like this, so it does appear to be well and truly lost.) That transient nature of art is made manifest early on, when Townsend and others speak about the experience of losing Fort Thunder, an underground art collective in a Providence textile factory that hadn’t been in operation since the 1860s; for five years at the end of the last century, the place was used as a living and working space for artists and musicians. However, while the Providence Place Mall was being built—notably with no entry access on the side that faced the Olneyville district that it butted up against—developers turned their eye to that warehouse district as a place that they could further capitalize upon, and they ultimately did destroy Fort Thunder. It was this parasitic ideology, the desire to completely fill out “unused space” in every way possible, that was part of the inspiration for the Providence Place apartment artists, as they, too, were finding a way to fill an empty part of the mall which had come to dominate the city. We also get to explore an outdoor exhibit that Townsend created even earlier, a hidden public space that was only accessible by slipping through train tracks and entering a sort of covered canal, in which he had placed dozens of human figures. That exhibit, Fort Thunder, tape art, the secret apartment itself — all of these things are fleeting. The secret apartment is recreated as a set for the film, and we get to see it being explored by Townsend, his now ex-wife Adriana Valdez-Young, and others, and it serves as a stage to recreate the day that Townsend was caught and apprehended in the apartment. And then, we see it dismantled. 

And yet, in all of this, there are things that remain eternal, and which we do carry with us. Several of the other members of the secret apartment crew retain, to this day, the keys used for entry into their protest/clubhouse (the building of a cinder block wall and the installation of a door is one of the highlights of their activity). One of them was originally painted with flames, the image of which has long since been worn away on the key’s surface but remains, in some small form, in the grooves. That’s where we carry art with us, and where it stays—in the grooves. It’s a surprisingly moving piece, and I can’t wait for others to see it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond