The History of Phanganist - Celebrating 6 Years!

In celebration of our six year anniversary we thought we would share with you a bit about how and why Phanganist was started and its development over the last six years...

Phanganist CEO Sharon tells us more...

Why did you decide to set up Phanganist?
I firstly had a website called Phangan art but it was a bit narrow so I expanded to Phanganist to cover other elements as well.

I wanted to create a platform for the artist community of the island and there was nothing else like it. Then I thought about something wider, a website that will put everything of Koh Phangan inside of it.

How did you make it come together?
I know how to make and do websites, this is most of the experience I came with plus a little design experience.

I uploaded precious data I had from other websites into Phanganist then started looking for things to write about, I was very shy at the beginning to approach people, we would write poems or take information from facebook etc.

Then we thought it would be a nice idea to take photos as well, at first it was with a small digital camera then we slowly developed.

I got a camera and then incorporated the process of the photos, it was amazing as it created an environment for me to take a lot of photos and get practice especially with night photography. There’s now more than 250,000 photos on Phanganist which means a million photos have been taken already!

You seem to have an eye for talent in people, how do you get people to cooperate?
There are many talented people on Koh Phangan so in this case it’s easy to find people but more than that it’s someone who’s willing to love art enough and want to grow because without this work it’s still paradise but without this passion it will not become something you can connect with.

Is it hard to be so charming all the time?
Ooooh c’mon! I’m not so charming all the time you can check with the Jungle Experience dancers!

What’s your favourite thing to do at the moment?
We are getting more and more into the videos now trying to create some more massive platform about that.

And what do you hope for the future of Phanganist?
To keep growing and to keep representing and be part of the art and general community of koh phangan.

To think of new formats and stuff, new ideas!