Suduu doesn’t seem particularly interested in staying inside the lines.

He calls himself a multidisciplinary artist and a spiritual leader, describes himself as an alchemist from a previous life, and says he works through a personal religion of love and creativity. His practice moves between sound, sight, story and whatever other medium can carry an idea to where it needs to go.

For Suduu, these aren’t contradictory identities. They are different parts of the same language.

“I believe I was an alchemist in my previous life, Wallahi,” he says. “That’s what makes me capable of working across different forms of art to tell a story.”

The spiritual leader is not a conventional one either. There is no institution, congregation or formal community behind the title. It is a personal philosophy, one rooted in love, creativity and the way he was raised by his mother, Hajia.

“Even as a single mother, she raised me with so much love,” he says.

That idea of love as something active — something that can be passed on, transformed and eventually made into art — sits at the centre of how Suduu understands his work.

In his own words, the “blessings” he shares through art are the feelings people receive when they encounter it. Whether through sound or sight, every story becomes an opportunity to give something away.

“Every story I tell is a blessing,” he says. “I am art.”

“I believe I was an alchemist in my previous life, Wallahi”

Kasoa-Zongo

But becoming this artist wasn’t necessarily easy.

Growing up in Kasoa-Zongo, Suduu says he often felt like someone who didn’t quite fit the environment around him. He describes people like himself as “almost extinct,” and says that at times, his surroundings felt like a barrier to his creativity.

Still, he refuses to frame the story entirely through limitation.

“I’m a bad boy — I’m resilient, and that’s what keeps me going,” he says.

There is humour in the way he tells it, but also a recognition of what it means to grow into an identity that isn’t immediately understood by the people around you. “My people still dey funfool, Wallahi,” he says, describing the pressure to conform and the danger of trying to please people who don’t understand the value of art.

For a while, that lack of understanding could have become an obstacle. Instead, it became another material.

Today, he says, both his family and his community have developed a deep respect for who he has become. His answer is characteristically blunt: he was resilient and adamant, “so they had no choice to watch me become who I am.”

That determination has roots in childhood.

When asked about a memory that continues to find its way into his work, Suduu gives an unexpectedly loaded answer: polygamy.

“That’s what fucked me up, and that’s also what blessed me.”

His childhood was shaped by the consequences of his father’s polygamous family. Suduu says he and his mother did not get to enjoy his father’s wealth and instead had to struggle on their own.

But the struggle gave him something else.

“It taught me that if I want something, I’ll find a way to get it.”

That stubbornness became a form of fuel. He describes himself as someone who naturally turns experience into art, someone who looks at the world differently and tries to imagine how another person might feel.

It is difficult to separate that instinct from his philosophy of love and creativity. For Suduu, experience isn’t simply something that happens to you. It is something you can transform.

“I’m a bad boy — I’m resilient, and that’s what keeps me going,”

The Alchemist

Perhaps that is why the idea of the alchemist appeals to him so strongly.

Suduu was named after his great-grandfather, whom he describes as a deeply spiritual and tough man. He was told that he came into the world a year after his great-grandfather died, and has always felt connected to that story.

Whether understood spiritually, symbolically or simply as a story passed down through family, it gives Suduu a way of thinking about inheritance: what we receive from the people who came before us, and what we choose to turn it into.

His answer to how he chooses between mediums is almost deliberately simple:

“The world no be anybody ein own, so the whole world is my canvas.”

There is no hierarchy in that statement. A brushstroke doesn’t have to compete with a sound. A story doesn’t have to belong to one medium. The medium follows the idea.

And sometimes, the idea arrives before he knows what to call it.

When asked whether his creative process begins with an idea, a feeling or something more difficult to explain, Suduu says every brushstroke, every name and every story in his work is connected to a real-life situation.

Later, he describes himself another way: as a vessel.

“I believe I’m a vessel and so any sound the universe sends me I receive it.”

It is a fitting description for someone who treats his practice less like a fixed discipline and more like a channel between experience and expression.

“The world no be anybody ein own, so the whole world is my canvas.”

A Soundtrack for Becoming

Music still sits somewhere inside that world, even when Suduu is working beyond it.

For RADIO, he was asked to choose three songs that could soundtrack his life.

His choices move through different moments and memories: “Morning,” Chronixx’s “Chronology,” and King Ayisoba’s “Sooba.”

The last carries a particularly personal story.

There were Frafra people around Kasoa-Zongo when Suduu was growing up, and he remembers hearing them play King Ayisoba’s music. He loved “Asaala dandara” from the first time he heard it. He later learned that the title meant “tomorrow.”

His memory of another phrase, however, became tangled with a specific event from his life. He associates “Asaala dandara” with the phrase “human no good,” and the song became connected to an experience that changed him.

Even with the weight of that memory, his affection for the music remains.

There is something revealing in that contradiction. Suduu doesn’t seem to believe that art has to be separated from the complicated parts of life to become beautiful.

Sometimes the complication is precisely what gives it meaning.

Becoming Alone

Perhaps the most telling thing about where Suduu is now is that he isn’t chasing more noise.

When asked what he is chasing creatively or spiritually, his answer is unexpectedly quiet: he is “unlearning how to hang with a lot of people.”

“I want to be alone most of the time.”

It doesn’t sound like withdrawal so much as a recalibration.

For an artist whose practice is built around receiving — receiving stories, sounds, memories, experiences and turning them into something else — solitude can become another kind of workspace.

And maybe that is where the alchemist comes in.

Suduu’s art seems less interested in documenting life exactly as it happens than in changing its chemical composition: taking struggle and turning it into determination; taking memory and turning it into story; taking spirituality and turning it into creative philosophy; taking the world around him and claiming it as a canvas.

He says he is art.

Perhaps the more interesting question is what happens when art is allowed to become a way of living.

For Suduu, the answer appears to be simple.

Receive. Transform. Give it back.

And make it your own.