AFFR x Archined X-mas Special: Secret Mall Apartment
Done with your Christmas shopping? Time to visit the mall!
But not just any mall: in Jeremy Workman’s documentary Secret Mall Apartment – winner of the AFFR Audience Award 2025 – we follow a group of art students who decide to squat a space in a new shopping centre – and then set up their home there.
A statement against consumerism, a protest against gentrification, a playful art installation, or all three in one? Decide for yourself and watch this documentary between 18 December and 11 January for only €5,- online via AFFR, because Secret Mall Apartment is this year’s AFFR x Archined X-mas Special! Or give it as a gift, so you don’t even have to leave the house to go to the mall.
About the film
Secret Mall Apartment, Jeremy Workman, 2024, U.S.A., ’92
A neighbourhood has to make way for a huge shopping centre in the American city of Providence. To process the loss of the neighbourhood, a group of art students ask if they can live in the shopping centre for a week. That week eventually becomes four years, during which they slowly but surely realize an inhabitable apartment in the undefinable square metres of the shopping centre. Is it a joke, an art installation, an extended work of performance art, or a political statement against the gentrification of their city?
Not only did the film win this year’s AFFR Audience Award, it also topped the annual list of recommendations that critical viewer Arthur Wortmann compiles each year for Archined.
