Since its official release a little over a year ago at South by Southwest in Austin,Texas, the Secret Mall Apartment has won numerous awards from the Cleveland International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Boston, the Calgary International Film Festival and the Newport International Film Festival among others. Locally, theatergoers can check out the documentary at the Providence Place and at the JPT Film + Event Center in Newport.

This documentary is about a space in the Providence Place Mall that was gradually and covertly converted by a group of artists into an apartment during the mid-2000s.

I talked with Michael Townsend, the catalyst behind the residential endeavor, about his memories from the original effort to create a livable space in the mall, his involvement in the creative medium of tape art and his thoughts on people’s reactions to the documentary.

Rob Duguay: With the Secret Mall Apartment documentary currently being screened, I’m willing to bet that you’ve been reflecting on various memories. What would you say sticks in your mind the most when it comes to those four years of utilizing the space in the Providence Place Mall?

Michael Townsend: The heart of it for me is just having all those different artists on film. The eight of us were a bunch of collaborative artists doing a bunch of different art projects, and to see ourselves exposed is very outrageous. All the stuff we filmed was never meant to be seen by anybody, so the nostalgia really has to do more with the people I was spending that time with. It was a unique period where eight artists spent five years on all of these various projects.

RD: You mentioned how the footage was never meant to be show, but you kept it on a Pentax Optio camera, so what made you want to keep it after all this? Was it for your own personal and private use to revisit this time period in your life, or was it for something else?

MT: As a group of artists, we had been doing these large art projects with the main ones revolving around doing collaborative tape art, which is drawing with tape on walls. We had been working on a September 11 project for about two years before the mall project started, so in that frame of time, we had been going to Manhattan and the project was to draw a life size silhouette of every fireman and every airline passenger that died in the World Trade Center. This ultimately was 500 locations all over Manhattan, so we were doing these temporary artworks and we were documenting them. We were in the mode of doing film and photo, film and photo, film and photo, and by the time we were moving furniture into the mall, we were in documentation mode all of the time. That footage was for our own record and it was just part of our professional practice.

There was no intention to ever have it be shown to anybody or to cut it into a film in any way.

RD: Speaking of tape art, it’s shown a lot in the documentary from Hasbro Children’s Hospital with patients along with the project for 9/11. Visual art has a lot of different facets to it. Tape art has a way of standing out, so what made you want to get into this creative medium while making all of these different silhouettes and collages?

MT: Tape art is a type of social medium because it’s driven by collaboration and I really like making art with other people, both artists and non-artists. It’s also a soft form of temporary graffiti, so you have that urge to sort of control the spaces around you or unify spaces or have a sense of stewardship, the tape gives you the sweet, sweet freedom to do that. We make murals that are sometimes two or three stories high and 100 feet across, and they’re all hyper-temporary. When we do a big mural, even if we’ve been working on it for weeks, the day it’s done, within 24 hours we tear them down. We love having the freedom to make them and the freedom to remove them, and all that practice of making art together was the engine that made building an apartment in the mall so easy for us because we were used to it.

RD: Yeah, I can see that. It’s been mentioned in the documentary that you view art and life as one in the same, so what or who do you consider to be your biggest inspiration for this outlook?

MT: When I was growing up, I had the sweet combination of a best friend who was two years older than me, and she was an absolute boundary-pusher and risk-taker. Her name is Sally Hewitt and my gosh, the amount of epic play we were involved in all the time. We’d come home from school, and my parents allowed us to go out the door unchecked and unmonitored for hours. I think having years and years and years of a person who just wanted to push boundaries and the freedom to do it sort of lays the ground rules for being someone who, if you can continue to keep that spirit alive, finds themselves later in life living in a mill building with other artists where there is freedom and permission to collaborate. You’re driven to make, play and take risks all the time, and that’s good for art, that’s the essence of it.

Art in a lot of ways is at its best just a lot of risk-taking with tiny, tiny things. It could be just a visual risk or playing a new note or doing a new dance, but it’s a form of risk-taking and it’s the only way that it’ll evolve.

RD: Since the time of everything that happened with the space in the mall, you’ve stuck around Providence. What has made you want to stay in the city rather than move somewhere else after everything that happened at Providence Place? 

MT: I grew up in a military family so I did move around a lot. I kind of consider the United States as my home. When you grow up moving around, and you find a place that you really fall in love with, you sort of can say that you’re from there. I moved to Providence in 1989 to attend school and I fell in love with the city, just head over heels ironically because there were so many places that I could explore. I liked the history and the architecture, but around the mall, the area was originally an abandoned University of Rhode Island building and across the street was an abandoned Masonic Temple. Across the highway was an abandoned cold storage building and there were all these places where we could explore, make art and make meaning inside those spaces.

It just got me addicted to this, especially the mill buildings here. In Eagle Square, where I lost my home and was evicted four times within the same block, I now own a subsidized art space. I love these mill buildings, I love the potential of them and I will continue to fight with them and for them until my last breath. ‘

RD: That’s a great mission to have and a great outlook to have on Providence itself. Going back to the documentary being screened, what are you the most happy about or most proud of with this documentary. What are your thoughts on the audiences’ reaction to it?

MT: It is super cool that it is showing at the mall. It’s incredibly rare that you get to watch a movie about a crime where the crime was committed, so kudos to the mall for allowing this film to be shown there. I’ve always had a sense that this story meant a lot to a lot of people, but to witness it first hand has been absolutely bonkers. During the first four days of the screenings, I did 26 Q&As where I’m showing up after the movie and spending 15 to 30 minutes with the audience just answering their questions. It’s from those questions that I get to learn what people are taking away from the movie, and the art educator part of my brain is very pleased.

People are asking questions about art, the meaning of art, the role of protest in people’s lives and the call to action to fight against systems. They’re seeing the movie and reading it well, and then along the way, I’ve managed to talk to hundreds of people who grew up with this story. The story broke in 2007, there are people who might have been six or seven years old when it happened who are now adults and they’ve been curious about it their entire lives. Jeremy Workman, who is the director, did a bang-up job of doing a portrait of Providence that people can relate to while simultaneously telling this story in a captivating way.