Film Screening: Secret Mall Apartment

In 2003, eight Rhode Island artists created their own secret apartment in a neglected space they found deep in the structure of a massive shopping mall and occupied it for four years, until they were eventually discovered and evicted. They filmed the entire project on a mini camcorder, and the result is this fascinating documentary, which asks compelling questions about public and private spaces and survival strategies in a capitalist world. In 2001 the sprawling Providence art-punk collective Fort Thunder was evicted and their historic building was demolished to make way for a Staples store, which itself closed down soon after and sat vacant. The destruction of this beloved nexus of the East Coast art community inspired Michael Townsend and his friends to colonize the recently constructed Providence Place mall nearby, which they saw as a similar commercial blight on the neighborhood. Snooping around behind the scenes, they discovered a forgotten corner of an upper floor, and over the course of many visits, somehow managed to put up drywall, add a door and bring in couches, rugs and tables without being discovered. They figured they would be busted sooner rather than later, but they were able to quietly occupy it for years before the mall staff finally noticed it and shut it down. Far more than just a prank, the Secret Mall Apartment (2024, TV-MA) became a deeply meaningful act for all the participants, at once an act of defiance against gentrification, a boundary-pushing work of conceptual art, and a 750 square foot space that stuck it to the man.