Exhibition catalogue from Stan Douglas: Inconsolable Memories at the Belkin (20 January-19 March 2006) with texts by Sven Lutticken and Philip Monk. The exhibition presents a new film work by Douglas and a series of photographs inspired by his recent trips to Cuba. The photographs were shot over the last two years and depict the recycled and often dilapidated urban architecture of Havana and its environs. Banks converted into motorcycle lots and villas transformed into schools embody the shifting economies of use under Castro’s Revolution. Douglas’s prints are immaculate and technically flawless, in obvious contrast to the ruin and entropy they portray. Douglas’s film work Inconsolable Memories is based on the Cuban cinematic masterpiece, Memories of Underdevelopment, directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea in 1968. Alea’s film portrayed the alienation of Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual caught up in the rapidly changing social reality of Cuba following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and the missile crisis of 1962. Douglas’ film relocates Sergio in 1980, the year of the Mariel boat exodus, when Castro allowed tens of thousands of Cubans to leave the island on a procession of boats arriving from Florida. Past and present overlap in Douglas’ film through his use of two 16mm film loops, unequal in length, but projected simultaneously onto one screen. Shots of both documentary and fictional footage combine and recombine to unravel the experience of film and to confront us with existential questions about time.