How do inequality, resistance, queerness and power influence love and loving? Two authors who are friends and dare to disagree, take a stand in an intimate conversation.

In Powerful Love, writers Clarice Gargard and Simon(e) van Saarloos discussed, among other things, love as a political terrain: fraught, uncomfortable and inevitable. Their starting points were Gargard's work on resistance, inherited trauma, black history and (r)evolution, and Van Saarloos' thoughts on intimacy, queerness and power structures.

Powerful Love was an open conversation about ways of living together that do not look away from pain, but face it head-on and perhaps find a form of revolution precisely there.

Clarice Gargard is a journalist, writer and documentary maker. The documentary Daddy and the Warlord, about her father and the Liberian civil wars, which she made in collaboration with Shamira Raphaëla, won a Gouden Kalf for Best Short Documentary in 2019. Gargard's book Drakendochter (Dragon Daughter) is about her family history, migration, politics and society. In 2022, her documentary Ga terug en haal het (VPRO) about the timelessness of black resistance in the Netherlands, Suriname and Curaçao was released. Her book From Resistance to (R)evolution (2025) is about how to unleash a personal and social (r)evolution.

Simon(e) van Saarloos is a writer and curator. They are the author of Against Ageism. A Queer Manifesto (2023); Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (2021) and Playing Monogamy (2019) as well as several books in Dutch: Herdenken herdacht (2019); Enz. Het Wildersproces (2018); the novel De vrouw die (2016); the collection of columns Ik deug / deug niet ( 2015) and Het monogame drama (2015).

Powerful Love was curated for Writers Unlimited Festival 2026 by Mojdeh Feili.