Latest news with #SecretMallApartment
Washington Post
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Secret Mall Apartment': Art project as prank, with a profound twist
'Secret Mall Apartment' delivers on its title. In this straightforward documentary of a wild-eyed tale of transgression and transcendence, a group of art students burrow into the concrete bowels of their local shopping mall, where they set up a cozy little living nook, complete with dining table, TV and china cabinet.
Chicago Tribune
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Secret Mall Apartment' review: When an extra-special shopping trip lasts 4 years
Puccini's struggling poets and dreamers had their Parisian Latin Quarter in 'La Bohème,' which begat 'Rent' a century later, with its Lower East Side New York squatters singing of pricey, boutique Santa Fe, for some reason. The real world tells myriad stories of similar artistic spirits, finding a place to call their own. For example: In 2003, a group of Providence, Rhode Island, artists embarked on a project combining installation art and surreptitious living arrangements. The year before, they'd been booted out of the city's Eagle Square neighborhood, lined with decrepit but tantalizing old mill warehouses. The one they called home was in Fort Thunder, demolished for redevelopment like so many beautiful, usable ruins in so many other parts of America. What to do? Four of these Providence residents located a strange little tucked-away space in the bowels of the newly built Providence Place mall. For them, the mall exemplified everything not right with city officials and developers displacing entire waves of young artists, squatting or legally renting, in the name of better living through upscale retail. They found the space and sneaked in, wondering: Could they evade mall security for an entire week? They could. Four years later, their adaptive reuse project came to an end. The delightful and finally rather moving documentary 'Secret Mall Apartment,' opening April 18 at the Music Box Theatre, combines footage shot between 2003 and 2007 of this adventure with director Jeremy Workman's contemporary interviews with the key participants. It was, says one of the four down-low residents, a 'funny kind of teenage mall existence.' With Michael Townsend, a longtime instructor with the Rhode Island School of Design, as the seriously committed front man, Adriana Valdez-Young (married to Townsend at the time), Andrew Oesch, Jay Zehngebot and Townsend figured out the best ways to access their secret lair, one being through the mall's movie theater security doors. They ate a lot of popcorn during those four years. They 'borrowed' some furniture from the stores and eventually bought dozens of cinderblocks, matching their windowless cinderblock surroundings, walling off their apartment to keep security guards from discovering them too easily. Their weirdly cozy 750-square-foot studio layout, a tiny dot in a 3.5 million-square-foot hunk of capitalism, was to these bohemian commandos a rebuke to the city's destruction of their old neighborhood close to the mall. Townsend describes the off-the-books apartment this way: 'Like a barnacle on a whale.' If 'Secret Mall Apartment' stuck to a sardonic comic groove, it'd probably still be worthwhile. But director Workman and company find more than that, in a true story of a truly nutty living situation. Townsend and company's artistic endeavors during those four years truly meant something: They developed far-flung 'tape art' projects — silhouettes and Keith Haring-style graphic illustrations using masking tape — as part of site-specific work memorializing Sept. 11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as dressing up a children's hospital interior. The mall project, which brought in a small, trusted group of other artist friends who came and went, served as their ironically unsafe safe space, while they poured their energy into some challenging and highly public work outside. Issues of urban renewal, the value of public art, the difficulty of being married to an obsessive artist and lots more run through Workman's film. It's consistently, thoughtfully engaging. And, yes, often very funny in its open-hearted embrace of the DIY spirit, legal or otherwise. 'Secret Mall Apartment' — 3.5 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (some flagrant trespassing, nonviolent)
New York Times
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How to Live in the Mall
When the artist Michael Townsend first told the documentarian Jeremy Workman about the time he and his friends lived in a secret apartment tucked inside the Providence Place Mall, Workman thought he was being punked. Then Townsend pulled out a cracked iPad to show Workman some grainy video. 'I just was dumbfounded and blown away,' Workman said in a video interview alongside Townsend. 'Then I was, like, instantly, 'I got to figure out how I could convince him to let me make a documentary on this.'' The result is the new film 'Secret Mall Apartment,' which recounts how, between 2003 and 2007, eight artists created a homey apartment in an abandoned space in a shopping center. Using footage the residents had filmed on a tiny camera, Workman places the stunt in the context of the rapid gentrification happening at the top of the 21st century while at the same time relying on some heist-movie conventions. So how did they do it? Here are six steps. 1. Find an abandoned space. When the mall was being built, Townsend noticed what he called a 'nowhere space,' an 'anomaly in the architecture' that served no purpose. So when Townsend and his friends decided to camp out at the mall after seeing an ad teasing that the place was so well stocked that it had everything a person needed to live, he sought out that corner as a place to sleep. How did Townsend clock it in the first place? He credited that to a fixation with the notion of space that arose as the mall was going up, part of the gentrification of his Providence, R.I., neighborhood that also resulted in the artists' space where he lived being demolished. 'It's not just losing the home, it's also losing historical vertebrae of the neighborhood,' Townsend said. As for the mall, 'You couldn't help but internalize that there was a lot of dead space in that structure,' he said. And thus, the notion of an apartment was born. 2. Get a couch. In the film, Townsend explains that the initial inhabitants of the mall apartment agreed that the most important thing to get first was a couch. Why a couch? 'It was a collaborative project,' Townsend said in our interview. 'So couches are like the simplest gesture toward collaboration as far as seating goes.' A couch, he added, also serves a dual purpose. You can sit on it to just hang out or play video games. (The mall apartment residents brought a PlayStation to their abode and played just one game, 'Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.') But you can also use a couch for sleeping. 'If you can pick one thing you're going to move into a space, I'd pick a couch over a mattress, any day,' he said. 3. Build a wall. The most ambitious renovation the artists made to the mall apartment involved building a wall out of cinder blocks so they could erect a doorway and install a door. That meant hauling about two tons of heavy materials up an incredibly steep staircase. 'I knew that those scenes with the wall and the cinder blocks and sneaking in the cement would be these incredible adrenaline rushes,' Workman said. 'We kind of built the movie around those.' Watching that footage in the documentary, he was struck by his youthful determination. 'Just this week, I carried two cinder blocks,' he said. 'I was like, gosh, these are nothing to be fooled around with.' 4. Get the lay of the land. Onscreen, Colin Bliss, one of the mall apartment denizens, builds a model of the mall and demonstrates just how they infiltrated it. He explains that there was an entrance from the outside, but that they could also use emergency exits to get to halls that led to the apartment. In one particularly hilarious bit of footage, you can see the crew climb into a tunnel hidden above a toilet to access their so-called home. Speaking of toilets, Bliss says they most frequently used the public restrooms on the first floor. That, of course, raises another question. What happened if he had to go in the middle of the night? Townsend, who said in our interview that he would live in the apartment for a couple of weeks at a time, answered the question. 'On the personal transparency tip, that wasn't ever an issue for me.' As for feeding themselves, they would of course use the food court and movie theater popcorn, but they also had a waffle iron and a hot plate. The year they got caught, Townsend said he had started experimenting with buying groceries at mall restaurants, ordering what he called 'whole salads.' 'I'm like, 'Bring me a carrot and a tomato and a half a head of lettuce and I'll pay you whatever it takes to happen,'' he recalled, adding that he would explain it as a 'dietary thing.' Then he would make a stir fry from those ingredients in the apartment. 5. Abide by the 'no outsiders' rule. 'The big rule was to not bring people from outside,' Jay Zehngebot, one of the artists, says in the film. Ultimately, there were eight people who had access to the apartment. If they started bringing in their friends its sanctity would be threatened. Despite being essentially the originator of the project, Townsend broke that rule when he decided to open the apartment's door to a friend from out of town. At that point, mall security officers had become aware of the artists' presence, but Townsend's misstep shut it down. 6. Believe that anything can be an art project. For the mall apartment to exist, it needed to be more than just a prank. Townsend and his compatriots believed in it as an extension of their artistic practices. Not only was it a place to plan their other works, among them a guerrilla 9/11 memorial at sites throughout New York City, but it also existed as an art object in itself. That's one reasons it lasted so long. 'I think there's definitely a solid vein of intentionality that runs through the whole thing that added to its survivability because we're taking it so seriously,' Townsend said.
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Secret Mall Apartment' and the Blurred Line Between Life and Art
What is art? Everyone has a different definition, not just at this moment in history but across eras. Art is a pretty picture. Art is what's in a museum. Art is what makes us human. Art is something to sell, or buy, or make, or make fun of. Art is everything, or nothing at all. Defining art isn't the stated aim of 'Secret Mall Apartment' (in theaters), Jeremy Workman's new documentary about artists who in 2003 managed to create and live undetected for four years in an apartment nestled in a shopping mall in Providence, R.I. That sounds bizarre because it is. Inspired by a commercial for the mall, Providence Place, in which a mother claims she wishes she could live there because it would make shopping so convenient, the artists found an empty, secluded space away from the retail corridors and planned a kind of performance art happening: They'd live there for a week, documenting it, subtly poking fun at developers' obsessions with so-called underutilized spaces. It seems like a practical joke, but the context was deadly serious, as Workman shows by structuring the film akin to a spiderweb. At the center is the mall apartment itself and the reasons the artists ended up staying several years. This story is built out with interviews with the participants — many of whom had never revealed their involvement — and with footage they shot on the tiny digital cameras we used to tote around back in the mid-aughts, small enough to fit in an Altoids tin. Sprawling from this central story — full of funny anecdotes about almost getting caught and their solutions to problems like an undetectable wall — is a sober set of concerns. Chief among them is the way that city officials and developers were addressing urban decay in Providence, and how the centerpiece of their solution was meant to be the mall. Workman makes ample use of news video to demonstrate how locals talked about the project at the time, including working-class residents who noted that the planned shops and the positioning of the mall entrance away from the less affluent part of the city signaled that it wasn't meant for them at all. He also enlists a crew to construct a full-scale model of the apartment so that the original dwellers can experience it again. But can an apartment be art? Yes, the movie suggests — if you understand art to be fused with life, a way of existing rather than just something you make and sell. Art can disrupt the ruling logic of whatever world we're living in. The de facto head of the project was Michael Townsend, who had taught many of the participants in a summer program at the Rhode Island School of Design and had imbued them with a sense that, as they put it, the lines between art and life were very porous and that aesthetics could be a good unto itself. To make something that nobody could own, that nobody could put in a museum, but that could perform its own small resistance against an economy that thrummed along on the rails of commerce, of buying and buying and buying: That was the good. Eventually the apartment was discovered, although Townsend was the only person linked to it (and remains banned from Providence Place). But 'Secret Mall Apartment' makes a compelling case that the project reverberates through the lives of the artists, and maybe even the city, to this day. Art doesn't have to be in a museum to be valuable; it doesn't have to be own-able, repeatable or even make sense to everyone. If it changes a few lives, then it's changed the world.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
They Lived in a "Secret Mall Apartment" for Years. Now, They're Telling the Story
A group of artists turned a hidden shopping center nook into a clandestine home: "At that time, I had a copy of Dwell and I was like, How do we make this something livable and desirable?" I first heard the story as a student at Brown University in 2023. It was passed down like an urban legend: Two decades earlier, eight Rhode Island artists set up camp in an off-map crawl space in the Providence Place mall. The group somehow outfitted the undeveloped corner of the colossal (and in-use) structure with the trappings of a home, from a dining table and secondhand couch to a TV set. Sneaking in through pitch-black service shafts, they made the forgotten concrete back room into a covert apartment, going as far as installing a door and running electricity, until they were busted in 2007. Scant news coverage and a few blurry photos were the only proof I could find that the unbelievable story was true. Two of the occupants, Adriana Valdez Young and Michael Townsend—then married, recent college grads—say that at first, they were simply curious if they could spend an entire day in the hidden section of the busy shopping mall. It spiraled into their group of eight hanging out in the unit on and off over the next four years, filming their escapades and planning art projects. ("When you're really weird, you don't think anything you do is weird," says Valdez Young. "What else are we gonna do?") Much of that footage made its way into a new documentary about the saga, in theaters (including a screen at Providence Place) as of March 21, after debuting in 2024 at SXSW. Secret Mall Apartment, directed by Jeremy Workman and executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg (who recently did a Tonight Show bit about the film with Jimmy Fallon), splices together the group's point-and-shoot clips with present-day interviews, telling the story of their hush-hush living space and unpacking the wider history of the divisive Providence development. The early 2000s "secret mall apartment" was born at a time of strife in Providence's real estate market. After more than 150 years of industry driving the local economy, the mid-20th century saw production dwindle, and the city became home to a large community of artists. Then, near the turn of the century, the city's economy shifted again. The abandoned textile mills where these artists lived and worked were demolished, pushing them out. Simultaneously, Providence Place was being built, promising to bring the city into a new era of economic prosperity. Today, the remaining mills are still under threat and Providence Place has an uncertain future, effectively declaring the state-level equivalent of bankruptcy. Ironically, some are now calling for the redevelopment of the massive mall into housing. I spoke with Valdez Young and Townsend about making a home in the mall, the state of Providence real estate, and (surprisingly) how Dwell influenced their secret apartment. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Michael Townsend: I had a habit of jogging past the mall's construction site. I identified a space that didn't fit into my calculus of usefulness. It didn't seem like stores or parking. When Adriana and I went to look, we shimmed in, and miraculously, [the empty nook] was there. Adriana Valdez Young: The project was about knowing the enemy, but also knowing what the future looked like. If the mall was the ideal version of Providence or the modern American city, then we had this curiosity to better understand how this behemoth worked. And if there was room for us in its future. MT: The [mall's] advertising campaign had two words: "Defining You." It was everywhere. We embraced it as a challenge and a threat simultaneously. How far will we let this building define us? AVY: This campaign was, oddly, for nothing, right? It was about defining the future of retail and of the city. The massive square footage of this shopping center far exceeded all the total retail in downtown Providence. There's no need to revitalize your little local economy. Don't worry. We're just taking care of it in one strike. The mall had a Tiffany's. There was a Brooks Brothers. How many people are wearing Brooks Brothers in downtown Providence? Nobody, right? It was an image of a lifestyle that didn't reflect local culture. When we were developing the apartment and hanging out at the mall as good shopper citizens, I remember [thinking about] the phrase "critique through hyperconformity." What if we did follow the rules and let them all define us? What would that look like? At some point, I recreated the "Defining You" ads. I bought everything from the mall, staged it, and returned it. It was like $1,000 to get everything you want from one picture. The math does not work when you try to achieve that kind of perfection—maybe for the one percent. MT: This question gets asked a lot. In my memory of the arrest, one of the clear thoughts I had was, Oh no, now I have to curate the story. Until that point, and I know this may sound ridiculous, but it was just our life. That was just how we lived our life. There were eight artists involved in this project, but we made the decision that Adriana and I would be a good face. The idea of a couple who's trying to make it. AVY: The shared American narrative. See the full story on They Lived in a "Secret Mall Apartment" for Years. Now, They're Telling the StoryRelated stories: My Dad, Richard Neutra, Through the Lens of a Landmark Psychological Study What 8 Months of Van Life Taught Me About Making a Home You Love The Unfulfilled Promise of the Nagakin Capsule Tower
