Secret Mall Apartment
Secret Mall Apartment
7.398%91%
In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside a busy mall and lived there for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than a prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all involved.
Kevin Ward reviewedJuly 1, 2025
This is an amusing doc about an art collective of sorts, led by Michael Townsend, that discovered a negative space within the confines of the Providence Place Mall and proceed to gradually build it up into a livable apartment space. I remember hearing about this story on a podcast (probably This American Life), and I was just super curious to finally put a visual to this story. It’s definitely entertaining. The secret mall apartment project functions here as more of a vehicle to bring awareness to the other works that Townsend and his fellows have worked on over the last decades. But there’s a lot of interesting discussion about what Art can be. It doesn’t necessarily be bound by form, function, location, motivation, and perhaps doesn’t even need an audience. There are certainly a lot of layers that can be pulled back on artistic expression, particularly as they attempt to recreate the apartment in a studio space.