- A person in New York City from India who saw me on the street and said, "You lived in the mall."

I was like, "How do you know this?"

He's like, "This was on the Indian news channels."

I was like, "Why?"

And he's like, "Because we love malls."

I was like, "What?!"

(intense upbeat-rock music) (door thudding) (guitar strumming) (timer beeping) Hi, my name is Michael Townsend, I'm a public artist and community art teacher.

Public art is exactly what it sounds like, it's making art in the public.

I draw on buildings with tape for a living.

So my great joy in life is collaborating with other artists to use the medium of tape to take over buildings and transform public spaces.

Home is obviously a very different thing for every person.

Home is effectively the space where you are allowed to be yourself.

- When I started to make "Secret Mall Apartment," you know, I think for a lot of people also who hear this story, they hear this story about, like, these crazy people that lived inside the Providence Place mall, and lived there for four years.

And you hear that story, and you're just like, "What?

That's so crazy.

What an insane prank.

- The joy and sort of the, like, light promise of the late '90s, early 2000s is that there was a cheap, big space for you in these industrial mill buildings.

If you're willing to be a pioneer who's gonna move into a space that may have been empty for decades, and turn it into an incubator for your art, that was a possibility.

- And I think one of the things that connects people, and connects, like, humans, and makes us sort of different, is that we're all kind of want to be creative souls, whether it's in their home or even in their office.

- And it's only a mile away from the mall, they saw our neighborhood and all these sort of, effectively, I put this in quotes, "empty mill buildings" as a place that could be turned into a strip mall, a new shopping center of some kind.

And, in order to make that happen, you're gonna need a lot of parking.

And as soon as you say the word parking, you gotta tear buildings down.

In rolling conversations, things like, "Oh, well, if we lose our homes, we should just live at the mall," turns into like, "Well, maybe."

(intriguing funky upbeat music) I would set off from Fort Thunder and run straight down Harris Avenue.

And Harris is a beeline to the mall.

So as the mall is being built, I'm watching every single beam of this mall go up.

The building is fitting onto a plot of land that has a river going underneath it, railroad tracks going underneath it, and it has a entrance ramp to a highway that creates a curve.

It's impossible, maybe, (chuckles) for an architect to build a building of that size and not have some abandoned, unused spaces.

So you're all of a sudden getting out of your traditional rectangle world, and you gotta start introducing some triangles, and maybe some crescents, and that's enough to create a space that ultimately is gonna become the apartment.

Few items we had was a flashlight.

And so, without that flashlight, there was no way we could have found that space.

To see it was to sort of recognize that you were witnessing a place lost to time, and that it was ripe for exploration, ripe for, ultimately, development.

Yeah, the most surreal part of living in the mall is that everything you do becomes dangerous.

So you are like just eating cereal in the morning, but it's dangerously, you know?

(chuckles) Putting on socks, but it's dangerous.

So that additional layer of suspense that things are gonna fall apart at any time, and that that might happen while you're just doing something really, really mundane, is the surreal part of it.

(bright orchestral upbeat music) When I was arrested, at that moment, becomes the act of curation.

And, in the act of curation, you are effectively declaring it a story or a narrative or an art object.

And Adriana and I took, you know, great pains in the months afterwards to sort of curate how the story was going to be told.

I ran into the director, Jeremy Workman, while I was doing a big mural in Athens, Greece.

- And I was filming for another documentary, and I was out there and I was at a building.

- I was on top of an opera house that had a big glass structure on top, I was doing a tape art 360 here.

- It'd be like sunsets and sunrises on the facade of the building.

And I was so blown away.

I was just like, "I have to meet the person that did this."

- We struck up a friendship.

And when he finished his documentary with Lily, he called me up and he is like, "Hey, I'd love to do a documentary about that."

And I was like, "That sounds good.

Are you willing to do the deep dive with all the other artists with historical background about Eagle Square, and the mall, and the city, like, you're gonna have to fall in love with Providence a little bit to make this story good."

And, in less than 24 hours, he had already gone through all of it, and he's like, "You have the footage for a movie here."

(mellow orchestral music) Art, art objects, art paintings, acts of incredible beautification, are purposeful enough, but in my own practice, I've always been very interested in an additional layer of addressing community concerns, or giving a voice to people who may not feel like they have a voice, and using these big buildings and public spaces as a way to exercise that experiment.

(mellow guitar music) (static whirring) (upbeat western music)