In Visiting Japan / Hiroshima 2001 (2001) Van Houwelingen mixes private photographs with those taken in Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after the atomic bomb. While visitors of the country are forced by countless memorials and memorabilia to reaffirm the victimization of Japan during the war, Van Houwelingen questions this role of the victim by literally placing himself in the position of those remembered. Visiting Japan / Hiroshima 2001 can be seen as a journey to the center of violence: a radical identification with her victims an a reflection on its political instrumentalisation by the Japanese state.

Biokip (2009) by Van Houwelingen shows the ten minute long death scene of his twelve year old chicken. Although she is not dead yet, for the world around her she might as well have been; while her fellow chicken scramble around in the background, insects are already finding their way to the dying animal. The video breaks with the expected peace of mind often associated with the concept of a 'natural death': the convulsions going through the animal, the moisture streaming from her beak and the tired last breath show a kind of violence that man often chooses to mask, but that remains the reality of any death.

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