Welcome to Studio Styles.

Between 2019 and 2024, I made a freelance writing, research and art career out of the question: How are Nigerians making a living, finding belonging and making meaning of the worlds within and around us—our work, our cultures, our ideas?

Studio Styles became my workshop for tinkering with ideas and projects designed to strengthen our connections with ourselves, our histories, our communities and the environment. We all deserve spaces where our thought counts, our rest is enabled, and our imagination is nourished.

In its first phase, I produced prototypes for:

• A Repository of Everyday Nigerian Thought (ARENT), my attempt at an alternative epistemic archive, countering colonial-DNA ways of producing and preserving knowledge. Its guiding question: How do we see the world?

• Sweet Medicine (2024–2025), a podcast on social healing through humanities education in Nigeria, and a manifesto for the dream library and community centre I hope to build one day. It asks: How do we heal?

• A publishing arm to sustain the presence of our intellectual landscape. Its first anthology, Restful (May 2025), asks: How do we cope?.

• A community space, #CulturePays (2023–2025), that supported culture workers in Africa with an infrastructure of continuity via a monthly opportunities newsletter, workshops, micro-grants, and a 2025 national survey/report on the economic realities of creatives and cultural organisers in Nigeria. This is the economic arm of care asking: How do we afford to keep going?

Right now, I'm re-gathering myself, composting—reflecting and clearing space—for Studio Styles's next phase. Ahead, I see more research on West African infrastructures (hard and soft), deeper experiments in mutual value exchange, and the continued blooming of a dream: a library that is also an independent press, documentary house, and public education centre. And more declarations, in cash and in kind, that #CulturePays.

As God wills it.

R. N. Abba,

July 2025.