Welcome to Studio Styles, my project space dedicated to research, editorial, and design initiatives that enable us to cultivate deeper connections with ourselves, our histories, our communities, and the environment.

I ideated this space in December 2019 when, as a graduate student, I felt disconnected from my university program’s compass which pointed away from Africa. I found it difficult to find/access the material I needed to ask about Nigeria the kinds of questions my UK education had trained me to ask—and that I enjoyed asking to no end—about Europe & the USA. This posed an existential crisis for me because I’m built to ask questions.

And so I returned to Nigeria with the question: How are Nigerians making a living, finding belonging and making meaning of the worlds within and around us—our stories, our ideas, our cultures?

After five years, it appears I have come to the end of this question. It has done its work by giving birth to other questions—same spirit, different shapes.

*This studio is named after the photographer Styles, in the play Sizwe Bansi is Dead, who used his studio to enact and memorialise the dreams and aspirations of his Black community under apartheid South Africa. I saw the play in 2011 as a secondary school student in Abuja and I carry its spirit—storytelling work as a matter of life and death—with me everywhere.

- Immaculata (immaculataabba.com)