Phumlani Pikoli
Author and filmmaker
When not photographing food or themselves, millennials have spent the finest years of their youth being the punchlines of jokes by older generations who just don’t get their darned ways.
Often-used lines of attack focus on a perceived inability to focus, an annoyingly intractable belief that anything they put their minds to is possible, and a proliferation of the offspring of these two notions: the “side hustle”.
Phumlani Pikoli’s résumé reads like a hyperbolised example of this. He’s been credited as a journalist across a variety of subject matter, a playwright, an author, a digital platform manager and editor — with all gigs performed with a cohesion of style and rigour that quickly debunks any characterisation of millennial laziness.
Pikoli is, foremost, a creative mind whose main output involves writing and from that basis he can, and does, take his craft anywhere.
His latest project began as the remarkably considered self-published book The Fatuous State of Severity, which has began morphing into something more.
The collection of short stories, a well-received collaborative work with illustrations by close friends such as 2016 FNB Art prize-winner Nolan Oswald Dennis, was written as a form of therapeutic catharsis while Pikoli was undergoing treatment for depression.
This year the book has spawned a film, shot and scored by affiliates in the same collaborative manner as the book.
The project, in his own words, is a “multidisciplinary anthology, more than a book released by one person”.
The book and movie have so far included work with contemporaries Fuzzy Slippers, Skhumbuzo Vabaza, Tseliso Monaheng, Dennis, Pola Maneli, Nas Hoosen and more.
Pikoli has similarly large-scale plans for 2017. First, he plans to complete his novel Born Freeloaders, about “black kids growing up in middle-class suburbia in Pretoria, and the influence of different forms of privilege”.
Then he has plans to stage the sequel to a play he wrote at age 22, titled Imperfect Draft 1, which was performed in 2010 at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, and also to produce digital features on a range of pertinent local themes.
Pikoli sees each thread of the work he’s involved in as tied to one central idea: “I just wanna write and express myself creatively, whether that be on paper, on stage, in film or in digital.”