wuruwuru is a community studio. We help independent creators fund, produce and distribute passion projects.
wuruwuru means "someway, somehow". It's culled from the Nigerian expression wuruwuru to the answer which describes a problem solved crookedly. It alludes to the experience of making things in Lagos without institutional support.
I set up the studio in 2020 to make a magazine, but then it veered into a handful of odd publishing experiments. In making these projects, I got closer to a lot of independent creators and was inspired to build a structure for spirited works of art.
In almost three years, we've produced 7 projects including a comic, two animated shorts, a board game, a documentary, an archive and an online novel. We've worked with over 40 creators and paid out close to $100k in commissions.
Our first set of projects were bootstrapped but we hope to sustain the studio through grants, crowdfunding and product sales. This manifesto lays out the plan in detail.
I run the studio with Williams Ogah. We set up a new team for each project and work remotely using methodologies picked up from a decade of software development. Each project becomes a community of practice that helps the artists improve and creates documentation for other creators.
Our goal is to build a sustainable long-term structure for independent creators. Many great ideas don’t see the light of day; this is our little intervention.