Rachel Bown-Mayo

I, An Apocchiolist' reimagines St Kilda through speculative, multispecies architectures shaped by small, deliberate acts of care. Blending auto-ethnographic narrative with hand-made artefacts, it pushes architectural communication beyond convention, using fiction as an accessible yet provocative method to test ideas and unsettle expectations. By engaging entangled ecologies and questioning inherited notions of “nature,” the work treats making as a philosophical practice - revealing how repair, storytelling and embodied attention can inspire more tender, adaptive futures for civic life.

'I, an Apocchiolist' explores small, careful ways of staying with the world rather than saving it. This is not a tale of grand apocalypse but of necessary persistence: people laughing, enduring, and remaking meaning together in the company of other species and shifting tides. Between hardship and affection, ruin and renewal, 'I, an Apocchiolist' reveals a way of living-together that extends beyond the human, where every act of care, however small, becomes part of a larger continuity. Here, survival is not resistance, but relation - the slow art of caring, despite it all.

From a bird house that slots into a brick wall, to a clay pipe for the mice to run through our homes, these hand-made artefacts act as tactile thinking devices within the project. They bridge speculative narrative and architectural inquiry, allowing ideas to emerge through material intuition rather than abstract representation alone. Each object becomes a small-scale test of care, adaptation and multispecies coexistence - carrying traces of the hand, the body and the site. By shaping and reshaping materials, the project rehearses future possibilities, revealing how repair, intimacy and slow craft can open new pathways for imagining built environments in shifting ecologies.

This short film follows 300 years of change through the continual redrawing of a single place. Each evolution reveals how shifts in climate and ecology prompt plants, animals and people to adapt together. Human interventions are present - sometimes gentle, sometimes disruptive - but always framed as opportunities to act with care and intention. As walls soften and boundaries dissolve, the idea of “nature” falls away, leaving only a shared world in constant negotiation. The film becomes a study of coexistence, tracing how attentive, deliberate actions can shape more compassionate futures for all who inhabit a place.


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