In the bowels of a 1.3 million-square-foot Providence mall, a group of friends made themselves at home. Their private living space—complete with furniture, fortified walls, and a door with a lock and key— went undetected for years. We were like a “barnacle on a whale,” explains artist Michael Townsend of the secret apartment he and several collaborators created in the early 2000s. For the first time, the story of the eight artists who created and lived in the hidden “unit” within the Providence Place mall is being told onscreen with the release of the documentary Secret Mall Apartment, which officially hits theaters this month following its SXSW debut last spring.

The film, directed by Jeremy Workman and produced by Jesse Eisenberg, explores themes of evolving cities, ephemeral art, and the importance of our built environment through interviews with the artists—plus an astounding amount of 20-year-old footage of the apartment’s hush-hush construction process taken on a point-and-shoot camera. At first designed as a rebellion against a gentrifying Providence, the project eventually ballooned into something even larger.

The idea for the secret mall apartment began with the destruction of Fort Thunder, a Providence artist commune in a warehouse that was caught in the crosshairs of the city’s gentrification. It’s a familiar tale: Developers pushed to tear down Fort Thunder and its neighboring historic mill buildings, the community (including Townsend) mounted a resistance, the artists were forced out in 2002, and the building was demolished. What followed? A parking lot and big-box stores, most of which shuttered in the following years.

After Townsend was forced out of Fort Thunder, he and a small group of friends spent a week secretly living inside the Providence Place mall—an entity they considered one of the earliest signs of negative changes to come to the area—as an experimental project. With Fort Thunder destroyed, Townsend wondered if it was possible to make the mall their new home. As Secret Mall Apartment details, they did just that. Because Townsend had seen the mall go up, he was able to pinpoint the perfect under-the-radar “apartment” space in the finished shopping center by thinking back to the building phase. The collective enjoyed spending many of their nights in the dwelling for four years until 2007, when Townsend was caught and charged with trespassing.

Ahead of the film’s limited March 21 release across the US, AD sat down with Townsend to reflect on the project nearly two decades later.

Architectural Digest: This project began when you decided to live inside the mall for just a week. When did the “week in the mall” become something bigger?

Michael Townsend: During our “week in the mall,” we found the space [that became the apartment], and that started the negotiations amongst us four artists; we couldn’t ignore this space, this opportunity. Prior to that, I had spent around two years of my life fighting to save historic mill buildings. That was a full-time passion. There were some 40-hour-week throw downs just dealing with city officials and developers, and during the course of all of that, I became entrenched in their ideology that said: “If you find a space that you deem to be underdeveloped, underserved, you have a responsibility to develop it.” From the city’s perspective, they wanted to develop those spaces because they were thinking the tax base wasn’t big over there, that they’re just filled with ramshackle artists and small businesses and a flea market. The developers viewed those buildings as things to be knocked down—they don’t look at the buildings, they look at the land, regardless of what structures are there. After spending years hearing those arguments over and over again, when we found that space in the mall, we thought, “You know what? I think we can roll with the consensus right now and develop this space.”

The original conversations about the idea of creating a home in the mall happened in 1999 and 2000, at the height of the tension of knowing that our home might get knocked down. I was still at Fort Thunder in that time fighting developers, and we could tell that the end was coming near. There was a conversation, flippantly, where we said, “If we lose a home, maybe we can gain a home.” The seed of the idea was planted then.

Do you still live in Providence?

I do. From my studio space, I can lean forward just the tiniest bit and I can see the mall through the window. It’s about a half mile away.

How did your relationship with the mall change over the course of those four years?

First of all, this mall defined the city very literally. I-95 is the main interstate that goes through our city. And if you drive on 95 and you look towards the city, it’s just mall—you can’t see the skyline anymore. Our beautiful state capital is not there, the mall is, architecturally, the wall you have to go through to experience Providence as a visual landscape.

So [if] this mall defined the city, then we were going to let the mall also define us. That’s a long way of saying that we started on the path of ritualistically moving towards letting the mall define who we are.

How did the decor in the secret apartment come together?

We were trying to make decisions in our space that ultimately would lead to something that looked like an advertisement inside the mall. We would buy things from the mall and bring them into our space. We would let the journey start to define what we wore, how we looked, how we behaved, what we desired.

Had you not been stopped by authorities, when do you feel like the project would have been done? In the film, the goal posts moved a few times. I know that at one point, you were focused on the prospect of receiving mail at the mall.

We, maybe luckily, were caught before we got to really ramp it up. When my arrest happened, it was a couple months before myself and my collaborator, Colin [Bliss], were going to move in for an entire year and let it completely wash over us: never leave the building for a year, get jobs at the mall, eat at the mall, exercise at the mall, become part of the whole ethos. Because the mall is a space of aspiration, it’s selling you your better self continuously. And we wanted to manifest that and have that be the experience.

Did you ever think about how the project would eventually be unveiled and packaged?

We never, ever thought it would have an audience. It was never meant to be seen by anybody. A good way to visualize that is, I got arrested a couple months after the iPhone was announced. So the iPhone, here, is a placeholder for the idea of sharing everything. We had cell phones, but they were all super stupid. Our entire time there was sort of off the grid, effectively. All we had was that one digital camera, 1.2 megapixels, to document the creation of the mall space. There was no end in sight, per se. I was arrested three days before the wood floors went in. We had moved those materials up into that space, it was very real. We’d built water tanks to start to supply our own water, and started to get plumbing going, and it was right on the verge of being too much. By the end, spending an entire year there was the new benchmark, and we didn’t know where it was going to go from there—like, what if I became manager of a store?

Were you going to quit your other jobs?

Yeah. We were lining up all of our finances and making it so that we never had to leave the property. Kissing our loved ones goodbye and being like, “I’ll see you at the mall! If you want a hug, you have to come to the mall.” We had started practicing ordering food from restaurants, especially salads, but ordering them as raw material, like, asking for a carrot, a tomato, and a head of lettuce. So we were like, “Wait, we can grocery shop in the mall.”

What is it about the built environment that intrigues you as an artist?

What you see in the collection of artworks in the film is that none of those artworks exist without buildings. They’re all installation pieces that only exist within the context of what physical structure is already there. And so my art practice has always been pushing back, ever so slightly, against this sort of set and built environment.

Architects get brought in to build these things that we’re going to have to look at for generations and generations in the way that somebody inside their own home decides, you know, “Paint this place. I don’t like this color, I don’t like that couch over there.” Much like you have a sense of control in your own interior spaces, I have that urge when I’m just out walking around looking at buildings where I think, Maybe there’s something we can do to improve this. I know there are other people, not just artists, but people in general who feel that tension that exists all the time.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.