Hi,

I’m an artist and researcher building a life where I produce, manage, and circulate beauty and knowledge, while making a positive difference in how the pursuit of knowledge is valued in post-colonial societies. Welcome to my workshop, Studio Styles.

As a secondary school student, I had committed myself to Chinua Achebe’s calling in his 1998 book Home and Exile to “others who may believe with me that a universal civilization is nowhere yet in sight” to join the “war against dispossession” through the “re-storying” of colonized people.

Then, as an undergraduate studying History, Literature, and Cultural Theory in London, I hit a wall when I found that I could not access as much historical and cultural data as I needed to explore the questions I had about my Nigerian society. Out of the frustrations I encountered over similar limits during my master's degree in History at Oxford, Studio Styles was born. In its first year (2020), I produced documentary projects on architecture, the built environment, religious and youth cultures in South-East Nigeria, in a double effort to make potential archival material as well as understand the barriers to documentary and archival production in Nigeria.

I returned to Nigeria after my master’s to embark on a four-year independent research project as Studio Styles, asking, ‘How are Nigerians making a living, finding belonging, and creating meaning in their lives today?’ In the process, I worked as a freelance journalist, researcher, and photographer with projects published and screened in the likes of the BFI (UK), LACMA (US), Art Jameel (UAE), The Republic (NG), Le Temps (CH), and Heinrich Böll Foundation (DE/NG). I also took up numerous fellowships at institutions such as the Royal African Society’s African Arguments (UK), Zeitz MOCAA (SA), DOCOMOMO International, the Open Society Foundations, and the Goethe-Institut Nigeria through which I gained exposure to and experience in global arts and culture writing, research, production, preservation, and management.

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Through this four-year project, treating the everyday as archive, the informal as theory, and the personal as data, I found that in Nigerian life, the social, moral, spiritual, and imaginative economies are the immaterial engine driving the nation’s material conditions, its politics, and financial economy.

And the fundamental challenge—at the level of ideas—of Nigerian life that I am most concerned with and most equipped to address is disconnection: from one’s self, community, history, and the environment.

In response to this challenge, I’m propagating a theory of knowledge as relational continuity: Life continually improvises intelligence; to know is to stay in rhythm with that improvisation, rather than to possess anything.

In this framework, the pursuit of knowledge is a pursuit of social healing, one that requires both contact and distance, rhythm and rest. Healing, here, does not mean erasing the wound but restoring our capacity to dig deep where we stand, and making visible the many ways—generative and destructive—we have responded to the problems of our world.

My current thinking owes a lot to Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel The Healers, Jacques Depelchin’s Silences in African History, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Tsitsi Dangaremba’s novel Nervous Conditions.

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The output of this four-year endeavour is a constellation of five prototype projects, each addressing the crisis of disconnection through a different register, and modelling different ways knowledge as relational continuity offers a foundation of social healing: dialogue (podcast), lived experience narrative (anthology), economic research for policy, an archive of collective imagination (documentary series), and embodiment (film).

• The Sweet Medicine Podcast, advocating for social healing through the humanities (funded through an Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop Fellowship);

• Restful, an anthology of essays and photographs by Nigerians on how they navigate stress in their intimate and social lives (funded by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria);

• #CulturePays, a collaboratively produced nationwide survey and report on the economic realities of Nigerian creative and cultural practitioners;

• Does Your God Sleep?, a documentary series on young Nigerians’ ideas about fear and God;

• Our Bodies, Nigeria’s Ghosts, a memoir-documentary film on inherited rhythms of coloniality and resistance in today’s Nigeria (funded by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria’s Post-Memory, Post-Archive project).

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So, what does propagating my theory of knowledge as relational continuity look like? I’d love to talk about it with you. Email me at hello@studiostyles.org.