Hans van Houwelingen draws critical attention to certain themes through his interventions, which are often performed on existing images and materials. His work is always on the interface of art, ideology and politics. The work Túbélá (Lingala for ‘confession’) was made in 2017 for the Church of St Joseph in Ostend, the parish church of the Belgian king Leopold II, which was privately funded with the huge profits from Congo. Hans van Houwelingen has added an extra confessional to the existing interior of this church, to give the church itself the opportunity to confess. What are the stories of the church, trapped between the dreadful reality of colonial rule and the loyalty to the power in whose name these deeds were perpetrated? What does a confession of colonial aggression and rhetorical justification sound like?Those hearing the confession listen to the story of Congo simultaneously from the mouths of the monkey and the Christ Child. They represent the two extremes of mankind’s self-image: Darwinian evolution on the one hand and Christian transcendence on the other – an infra and a supra humanity. In its dismissal of the theory of evolution, the church participated by tradition in the brutality of racial ‘primitivism’, a programmatic denial of humanity. The voice of Christianity, as an ideology of charity, but also as an alibi for unspeakable brutality and suffering, becomes audible.No attention is usually paid to the back of the confessional, which always stands against the wall. There is nothing to see, and yet it shows ‘everything’. 300 million-year-old fossils of fish and ammonites give a perspective of God’s creation where history happens on a different, geological time scale, in which Christianity appears for a mere fraction of a second.