Tropic Sprockets / Secret Mall Apartment

By Ian Brockway

“Secret Mall Apartment,” a documentary by director Jeremy Workman focuses on the energies of RISDI artist and teacher Michael Townsend and his collaborators. The film is engaging, informative and moderately quirky. [Showtimes and trailer at TropicCinema.com]

Townsend was a resident of the bohemian arts community named Thunder Point in 1996. In 2003 Rhode Island executives took control of the warehouses to make way for Providence Place, a new mall outside of Providence.

Because Townsend was an artist and a mall kid, he spent hours and hours in the shopping complex, and he spied an abandoned storage space right near the upstairs food court.

Townsend and his friends got the idea to make it a living condo, through several covert trips to Home Depot in 2003. Aside from two incidents, Townsend and friends were undetected in their home building efforts.

The film evolves into a gradual revolt against capitalism and conventional status quo. Startlingly, the group builds a home for next to nothing in mall space, and lives there for years.

In addition to Townsend’s unorthodox home building, the film chronicles the creator’s efforts memorizing Oklahoma City and September 11 in New York City through his art. He employs tape stencils in his life size figures. Townsend also works in children’s hospitals making art and involving the patients in direct participation.

Most compellingly, Townsend’s wife Adriana reaches an impasse in the conception of the apartment construction. Townsend wants to live there permanently while Adriana does not. The couple agrees to divorce. For Townsend, he takes the stubborn unyielding path: art is life and life is art. There is no separation or compromise.

Eventually, the novelty of the homemade mall apartment wanes. The housemates don’t know where they are over time. There are no windows, and they begin to feel isolated in a borderland between cinderblocks and nowhere certain. One by one, the residents exit.

This is an unusual documentary that raises questions about purpose and the meaning of art. While at times it feels repetitive in its emphasis on the relationship between malls and home building, it is most evocative in its finely detailed illustration of Townsend as a driven passionate man of images and empathy.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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