Erik Alfredo Martínez Animates Memory in Land of Time
As PHLAFF 2025 continues to unfold across the city’s most vital arts spaces, we turn our lens toward a rising voice in Dominican multimedia art: Erik Alfredo Martínez (Los Fellows 2024) , whose work occupies the space between cinema, architecture, and memory. At just 28, Martínez is no stranger to international screens or experimental exhibitions—and this year, he joins PHLAFF’s 14th Season with Tierra del Tiempo / Land of Time, a meditative and visually rich multi-channel video installation that invites viewers to consider the lives of movie theaters long after the credits roll.
The Artist as Archivist
Born in Santiago de los Caballeros in 1996, Martínez has built a career by animating the intangible: memory, place, and passage. He’s a graduate of the Chavón School of Design’s Film Program, where he developed a foundation in screenwriting and post-production before branching into animation, VFX, and design. His artistic language is deeply interdisciplinary—his fiction short Brasil (2018) and his animated works have appeared at prestigious showcases like the Cinalfama Lisbon International Film Festival, Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival, and Fabrica Research Centre, where he completed a creative residency in 2019.
Whether collaborating with Simulacro Magazine, Alliance Française Santo Domingo, or Güasábara Cine, Martínez brings a sensitivity to detail and a deep respect for visual storytelling. His projects aren't just about aesthetics; they’re about preservation, reinterpretation, and emotional archaeology.
Land of Time — A Cinema Without People
Land of Time (Tierra del Tiempo) is perhaps Martínez’s most quietly radical work yet. A two-minute animated, multi-channel video installation, the piece offers a portrait of four historical movie theatres in the Dominican Republic—not as entertainment venues, but as living witnesses to time. The project shifts our gaze from the films these theaters once screened to the spaces themselves: their empty chairs, crumbling facades, and the way light moves across their forgotten screens.
The teaser alone is evocative and slow-burning: rich amber hues, flickering architectural silhouettes, and minimal camera movement—all bathed in a haunting ambient soundscape—transform each frame into a meditation. There's no dialogue, only the echo of time and memory itself. The aesthetic evokes decayed film reels and sun-bleached posters, suggesting both reverence and loss. Land of Time doesn’t dramatize history—it listens to it.
By combining the texture of old 35mm prints with the motion of digital animation, Martínez makes the cinemas feel almost like breathing organisms—quietly aging, slowly fading, yet eternally watching. These buildings, once full of life and collective emotion, now serve as stoic monuments to changing urban landscapes and the cultural shifts that accompany them.
In line with his background in visual effects, design, and narrative film, Martínez doesn’t just record the passage of time—he sculpts it, guiding viewers to contemplate how the places we gather to dream can themselves become ghosts of those very dreams. The installation invites viewers not only to look, but to reflect, and in doing so, repositions cinema as a form of public memory.
Sonic Landscapes by Samuel Caraballo
Martínez’s visual sensitivity finds a complementary voice in the work of Samuel Caraballo, whose compositions Paseo Nocturno (3:12) and Béisbol Dreaming (2:21) are featured in PHLAFF 2025’s Sound Installations. A musician, filmmaker, and photographer from Santo Domingo, Caraballo launched his ambient music project Cuarto Mundo in 2024. His debut EP fuses cinematic textures with narrative undertones, building lush sonic spaces rich with nostalgia and dreamlike tones.
In Nuevo Orden, Caraballo’s most recent release, he explores childhood memory, video game aesthetics, and ambient soundscapes—all of which echo the emotional terrain Martínez treads in Land of Time. Together, their works hum with shared questions: What do we hold onto? What disappears?
Reimagining the Frame
Like many of PHLAFF’s featured artists, Martínez isn’t just a filmmaker—he’s a re-framer. By animating the edges of memory and spotlighting forgotten structures, he urges us to see differently: to view cinema not as something that simply happens on a screen, but something that lingers in space, in time, in us.
As PHLAFF 2025 continues to elevate the stories of the Latinx diaspora, Land of Time offers a powerful meditation on what’s left behind—and why it still matters.
Check Land of Time at Cherry St. Pier from June 6–28. For information on Pier operating hours please visit www.cherrystreetpier.com
