In 2003, a gaggle of artists secretly moved right into a 750-square-foot area in a big mall in downtown Windfall, Rhode Island. They didn’t count on to remain greater than a day, per week at most: The mall was upscale, the safety sturdy, and the specter of being discovered and kicked out was ever-present. They stayed for 4 years.
The group lacked working water, relied on the mall’s public loos, and couldn’t get mail delivered — however they turned an area initially plagued by development materials into a house the place they ate, slept, learn, held conferences, watched TV, and performed video games on a Sony PlayStation 2. Their sanctuary remained till at some point in 2007 when safety officers busted in. Michael Townsend, the chief of the group and a pioneer of tape artwork, was arrested, charged with trespassing, and banned from the mall for all times. The brand new feature-length documentary Secret Mall House, directed by Jeremy Workman — which simply premiered on the theater in that very mall this previous weekend — unveils the total story for the primary time.
Movie nonetheless of Secret Mall House (2024)
Previous to this documentary, Townsend had denied greater than 30 filmmakers who approached him. He and Workman first met in 2019 in Greece, when the latter was filming Lily Topples the World (2021) whereas the previous was touring for a tape artwork undertaking. “I met Michael as an artist first,” Workman advised Hyperallergic. “I didn’t meet him as the guy who snuck in, lived inside the secret apartment … that sort of stuck with me and stayed with me over the course of the entire production.” Workman’s notion of the mall residence as an extension of Townsend’s artwork observe, relatively than pure spectacle, received Townsend’s belief — in addition to entry to the 24 hours of video recordings that Townsend had stored on a Pentax Optio S4i for 17 years.
This private video archive serves because the movie’s backbone, round which current-day interviews and different public archival supplies weave. The low-res, handheld footage paperwork not solely the method of establishing the residence and their gatherings inside it but in addition the streets, faculties, and hospitals the place the group’s different collaborative artwork tasks befell, providing explicit perception into their utilization of tape to attract and facilitate interactions in public areas. Just like the mall residence undertaking, the entire collective’s different works have the standard of impermanence. For the “Hope Project” (2001), for instance, the group sought to make about 500 life-size silhouette portraits of each fireman and airline passenger who died within the 9/11 assaults, organized within the form of 4 large hearts throughout New York Metropolis’s streets. On the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma Metropolis Bombing and the “Hope Mural” (1995), the tape artists traveled to Oklahoma Metropolis to work on “Week of Hope” (2005), a public wall memorial. Additionally they collaborated with native faculties, hospitals, and neighborhood facilities to carry workshops and make artwork.
Was the mall residence undertaking against the law? A prank? A murals — a durational efficiency, an interactive underground set up? A social experiment? A critique of consumerism, gentrification, or capitalism? “For [the artists] it’s like, sometimes it was a place where it was their living space; sometimes it was just a headquarters; but other times it was like this set,” Workman mentioned. Although elements of the movie can err towards overly sentimental, resembling when the music crescendos whereas former collective members present their keys to the titular residence on the finish, its private contact may be the easiest way to honor the integrity of the undertaking — which was in the end a secret shared between buddies.
Movie nonetheless of Secret Mall House (2024)
Movie nonetheless of Secret Mall House (2024)
Secret Mall House (2024), directed by Jeremy Workman, is screening on the IFC Middle (323 sixth Avenue, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) March 26–April 3.
