STORY

Born in Dec 1995 in the hard labouring heart of Damascus city, Syria, in the Al-Qadam neighbourhood, Ghaith opened their eyes to pouring skies. The rain had finally broken the dry ache of the harvest, which is why Ghaith got their name. Ghaith: rain that brings relief, blessing, and life, often after drought, or, the act of saving from severity.

This Sagittarius, Leo, Leo was brought up by parents invested in academia, science, poetry, theatre, and Marxism. At the age of 14, their reading list, plotted by their father, contained Gabriel García Márquez, Euripides, Sappho, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and Mahmoud Darwish, to mention a few. Their mom, a mechanical engineer still in the process of finishing her studies then, would make of Ghaith a sweet little university friend. Having no other option, she had to bring her kid with her to classes. This sculpting experience flowered later in Ghaith's life in many ways, but the most obvious would be their pursuit of studying Architecture and a very tight bond with their mother, a mommy's kid one could say.

In 2011, with the engulfing blaze of the Arab Spring, at the age of 16, Ghaith could not fight the urge of the uprising anymore. It was the moment, now or never. With their group of friends, all unified under the banner of an educated revolution, a movement carried by hope for a better future, continuing the line of political and civil work our parents passed on to us, we took on the heavy and scary task of printing the resistance. We carried out calculated motions at night, surging through the streets of Rief Dimashq, the Damascus suburbs. We split the towns into sections, to each of us their district. We distributed announcements of upcoming protests, slogans, and news unburdened by the regime's propaganda and censorship. We did this until some of us got really hurt.

The general state of depression and hopelessness that followed was bigger than any individual. People felt suffocated, yet somehow had to pull through, continue living if they could. And the youth, the young warm blooded ones who carry the dreams of the future, turned cold. What dream can one have that is bigger than the crumbles everyone is surviving off?

This was the peak of the immigration wave into the EU. This was the time when Frontex was guarding the Hungarian forest as if monsters might break through the siege. This was the time when Turkey was playing its cards to enter the EU, its winning card being the souls running for their lives, 'Let us into the EU and we will make sure the borders to Europe are well closed, clogged, gated’. This was the time when the European coastal guard was tornado circling around crackling wooden boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and hundreds of people, thousands eventually, would join each other to create another Drexciya, another Atlantis, another myth where their refuge would be awarded shelter, in their next life. This is 2015. This is when Ghaith set foot in Europe, arriving in the Netherlands at the age of 19.

Three years later, in Den Haag, after abandoning the dream of Architecture and leaving behind a preparatory year at TU Delft, in 2018 they were admitted to the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague. For the next five years, they ventured into working with all aspects of sound, the sonic phenomenon, and what constitutes the experience of it. Between theory and practice, Ghaith developed a wide range of skills and interests, from in depth academic articulation, spatial theory, coding sound machines, psychoacoustics, sound engineering, circuitry, composition, and to nerdy sound mathematics and physics.

Along the road to finishing their studies, Den Haag (The Hague) became too small for them, so by the end of 2019 they moved to Amsterdam, where they are based hitherto.

Student life felt a little too narrow for Ghaith, so during these years they engaged in and took part in multiple artistic works and projects on many different scales, from Prix de Rome, to Holland Festival, and to small scale unpaid gigs and friends' projects. This expanded their professional experience and their network. In addition to their artistic practice, the dream of activism that their parents had passed on to them persisted. Starting from their locale, they became responsible for and the main person behind many collectives and projects: Pam Wide Open, the cultural outlet of queer bar Pamela in Amsterdam; ISSUE magazine, a queer collective producing an annual print, a series of events around it, and a pop up cultural space; Syrian Tonalities, an event series focused on platforming Syrian makers working from within Syria or in the diaspora; and The Queer Super Diversity Podcast Show, commissioned by Queer is Not a Manifesto, a podcast series focused on delving into the understanding of identity in relation to intersections, labour, multiplicity, complexity, and the production of identity itself through systems of monetisation.

In 2023, in pursuit of deepening their academic investments, they joined a master's in Comparative Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, which drove them to focus more on essays, developing their interest specifically in Agential Realism, Afro Futurism, Orientalism, and Trans and Queer Theory. After spending two whole years invested in this academic context, life took over and the output of work seemed more relevant than a diploma, resulting in them leaving the department and investing fully in their work.

Nowadays, Ghaith Kween Qoutainy is opening new doors of performance, theatre, poetry and the question of translation, home and embodied belonging, in-transness, and moving away from West centric ideologies.

Their most recent cultural programming work focuses on moving away from the over consumed idea of community, the centralisation of a shared identity and its exclusionary tendencies, and toward collectivity, through which they are trying to establish what can be referred to as critical zones, a space with a controlled setting that facilitates conversation and cultivates inter-dialogue, embracing differences, embracing each other, and moving towards a togetherness.