Falyriae Interview

 

Hi Falyriae! First of all, we’re excited to have you here, thank you for taking the time. It really means a lot. I hope you’re ready for my silly questions. To start things off, like in every interview, who are you? Could you give us a brief introduction to yourself and your work: what your primary art form is, and how long you’ve been creating?

First of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

I'm Falyriae, a visual artist from Sicily, and photography has been the center of my practice since 2022. I don't think my work begins with images. It begins with questions, questions about memory, the sacred, and the symbolic structures that continue to inhabit us long after we've forgotten where they came from. Photography simply became the language through which I could investigate them.

Much of my research revolves around mythology, the history of religions, folklore, and the
darker dimensions of the human psyche. Rather than documenting the visible world, I'm
interested in revealing those forgotten layers of experience that still survive beneath our
modern consciousness.

For all the photography nerds out there, what kind of camera and equipment do you use?

I currently work with a Canon EOS M100, a mirrorless camera featuring a 24.2-megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor. My setup is fairly minimal: I use a Canon EF 50mm prime lens for almost all of my work, alongside a Canon EF 28–90mm zoom lens whenever I need greater versatility in framing. However, the 50mm has become almost inseparable from the way I see. Its perspective feels honest, neither intrusive nor detached, and it naturally invites a slower, more attentive relationship with the subject.

I've never been particularly interested in owning expensive equipment. Of course, high-end cameras offer remarkable technical advantages, but I've never mistaken technical excellence for
artistic necessity.

Are there artists or photographers you would name as important influences or inspirations?

There are many artists whose work I admire, but if I had to mention two photographers in
particular, I would choose William Mortensen and Walter Bird.

What draws me to Mortensen is his ability to move beyond the purely documentary nature of photography. His images possess a powerful imaginative quality, where allegory, symbolism and theatrical composition become just as important as the subject itself. They remind us that photography can create worlds rather than simply record them.

Walter Bird's work fascinates me for entirely different reasons. I admire the quiet elegance of hisportraits and the atmosphere they evoke. There is a subtle tension in his images that makes them feel timeless, as though they exist somewhere between reality and imagination. That said, I don't consciously model my work after any particular photographer. I enjoy discovering different artistic voices, but I prefer not to imitate them. I think every artist eventually has to cultivate a visual language that grows from their own questions, experiences and way of seeing the world.

What do you think has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in the art world as a photographer, or more specifically within metal culture?

To be honest, I can't say I've faced any truly insurmountable challenges. Like many photographers, the hardest part at the beginning was simply finding my place in a field already shaped by incredibly talented and well-established artists. That can feel intimidating, especially when you're still trying to develop your own voice. 

What surprised me most, though, was the opposite. I still remember the moment some contemporary artists I deeply admire started following my work. I was genuinely stunned. Knowing that people whose work had inspired me were paying attention to mine gave me a quiet sense of confidence and reminded me that authenticity is often more important than trying to compete with anyone else. 

As for the metal community, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive. I've met passionate, supportive, and genuinely inspiring people. Like any environment, it has its complexities, but I've always felt welcomed rather than judged. 

"Kali Yuga"

To stay on the topic of challenges: what keeps you motivated and creative? How do you deal with “art block,” if you experience it at all?

To be honest, I rarely experience what people call "art block." If anything, I tend to experience the opposite. 

For me, creativity is like a fire. It is always burning. Sometimes it glows quietly beneath the surface; at other times it becomes so intense that the real challenge is not finding a vision, but containing it. 

I don't believe visions can be forced. They emerge in their own time, and my role is not to invent them but to remain inwardly prepared to receive them without diminishing their mystery or betraying their essence. 

Before we bore anyone to death, let’s move a bit deeper, into the philosophy and the work itself. Your work contains many references to ancient traditions and religions. It seems to exist somewhere between documentation and ritual. When you create an image, do you feel like you are capturing something that already exists, or invoking something into being?

I think the question itself reflects a very modern way of looking at the world. 

We're accustomed to believing that reality is something outside of us, something to capture, manipulate or bring into existence. Ancient traditions suggest something very different. They remind us that the world is not an object standing opposite the observer, but a living reality in which we already participate. 

That's the space my work tries to inhabit. 

I don't approach photography as an act of documentation, nor as an act of invention. I see it as a meeting. The landscape, the body, the symbol and the person behind the camera all shape one another. None of them remains unchanged. 

Perhaps that is why ritual feels so close to photography in my practice. A ritual doesn't create the sacred, and it doesn't merely observe it. It transforms the relationship between the human

being and what has always been present. I hope my photographs can do the same, not by explaining the mystery, but by returning the viewer to it. 

Where and how did your fascination start with all these occult, ancient traditions etc. things?

I've never experienced my fascination with the occult as something I consciously acquired. It has been part of the way I look at the world for as long as I can remember. 

Even as a child, I was drawn to questions that didn't seem to interest the people around me. I wanted to understand why ancient civilizations thought the way they did, why certain symbols survived for thousands of years, and why stories that should have belonged to the past still felt strangely alive. 

Growing up between Egyptian and Greek heritage probably nurtured that curiosity. Those cultures never felt distant to me; they felt familiar, almost like echoes I instinctively recognized before I understood them intellectually. 

Later, studying mythology, the history of religions, and folklore gave names and historical context to intuitions I had carried for years. But knowledge didn't create the fascination. It simply gave me better questions to ask.

For the future generation or new people, your work could also be a pathway to these themes. So, If your camera is a tool of transformation, what is the state you want to guide the viewer into? Discomfort, enlightenment, or perhaps a confrontation with their own mortality?

I don't want the viewer to leave with a feeling. Feelings disappear. 

I want them to leave with something unresolved. 

I think great art doesn't resolve tension; it creates it. It introduces a fracture into the way we think, and that fracture continues working long after the encounter with the image has ended. 

If my photographs transform anything, I hope they awaken something ancient within the viewer, something that modern life has taught us to ignore, but never truly erased. 

"Serpent sin"

I believe that in some esoteric traditions, knowledge comes at a cost? Has your artistic or spiritual path demanded something from you in return? Since following your passion can sometimes mean leaving things behind, relationships, stability, certainty. What would you say to someone just starting out? What would you say is the harsher reality of becoming an “artist”?

I believe you're absolutely right. There was a period in my life when I almost completely withdrew from the world to devote myself entirely to my work. I needed silence, time, and a space where everything else simply ceased to exist. 

In many ways, it isn't so different from what happened in numerous ancient traditions. Before certain rites, priests and priestesses would withdraw from ordinary life, observing periods of silence, purification, or abstinence. It was a way of creating the inner conditions for transformation. 

I don't think every artist has to isolate themselves in the same way, but I do believe that meaningful work always demands something in return. Sometimes it's comfort. Sometimes certainty. Sometimes relationships that no longer grow in the same direction.

If I could say one thing to someone just starting out, it would be this: don't expect constant reassurance. The hardest part of becoming an artist isn't learning a technique—it's continuing to create when nobody can tell you whether you're on the right path. You have to learn to trust your own vision long before anyone else does. 

 

If we stay in that more honest space, in black metal, there’s often a fixation on authenticity, “trve kvlt,”. In your work, is there something you refuse to aestheticize or make “beautiful,” even if it might be visually compelling?

I have no interest in making everything beautiful. There are things I refuse to aestheticize simply because they deserve to remain difficult. Grief. Madness. Faith. Death. Ecstasy. Despair. They are not ornaments, and they are not symbols to be consumed. Beauty, by itself, is one of the easiest things to produce.

What interests me is truth, even when it is uncomfortable, grotesque, or impossible to explain. The moment I start beautifying something simply because it looks striking, I've already betrayed it. 

 

In many of your works, nature and the forest play a central role. Forests can represent both refuge and danger, what does the forest mean to you personally? Do you relate to the idea that humans are part of nature rather than separate from it? If so, how?

Nature has never been merely a place to me. It is the closest thing I know to a living temple not because it was built for us, but because it has never needed us to exist. 

Whenever I enter a forest, I have the unsettling sensation that I am stepping into an intelligence far older than humanity. Trees, stones, rivers, and mountains seem to participate in an order that neither asks for our understanding nor depends on our presence. There is something profoundly humbling about realizing that the world was already alive long before we gave it names, and that it will continue long after we are gone. 

I believe one of humanity's greatest illusions is the conviction that we stand apart from nature, as if we were observers looking in from the outside. We are not separate from it any more than a wave is separate from the sea. We belong to the same breath, the same cycles of birth, decay, silence, and renewal. 

Perhaps that is why almost all of my work is created outdoors. I don't use the landscape as a setting; I surrender to it. The wind alters the movement of the body, the light decides what remains hidden, the earth leaves its marks, and chance becomes another author of the image. I don't seek to control these forces. I try to listen to them. 

The forest reminds me that existence is immeasurably larger than the human story. In its silence, I don't feel alone, I feel witnessed. 

 

Do you believe art has the power to reconnect people with nature, especially in a world that is becoming increasingly urbanized and digital, even shaped by AI?

Absolutely. 

I don't believe the greatest danger of AI is that it will replace artists. The real danger is that it may make us forget the value of direct experience. 

We are already surrounded by an endless stream of images, yet we often spend less time truly looking at the world. AI can produce limitless visual content within seconds, but art is not

defined by speed or abundance. Its value lies in the encounter that gave birth to it. 

Yes, I believe art can reconnect us, but not because it teaches us something new. Its deepest purpose has always been remembrance. Long before it became an object to collect or consume, art was one of the ways human beings recognized themselves within the cosmos. It reminded us that we do not stand outside existence looking in, but participate in it. Every civilization has expressed that intuition differently, yet the impulse has remained the same: to make visible what is otherwise forgotten. 

I don't think that purpose will ever disappear. As our technologies become more powerful, the need for art becomes even more essential, not because it offers more images, but because it reminds us how to inhabit the world again. 

 

 

Regardless of that, your work still focuses heavily on the human body. Sometimes in art, the body can be seen as a temple, a sacrifice, or a prison. How do you view the human form? Is it a vessel for something beyond, or simply material to be reshaped? What led you to photograph human forms, rather than something more abstract.

I regard the human body as a vessel, not as a passive container, but as an instrument of transmission. It is through the body that realities exceeding ordinary consciousness may disclose themselves. I have always been fascinated by the idea that certain states of ecstasy, ritual, or contemplation allow the individual self to recede, making way for something more primordial to speak through flesh. 

Across cultures, the body has never been merely biological. It has served as the locus of initiation, possession, revelation, and metamorphosis. It is where unseen currents acquire gesture, breath, and presence. Whether one interprets these experiences as numinous, archetypal, or profoundly psychological is secondary. What matters to me is the conviction that the body is capable of mediating encounters with dimensions of existence that cannot be reduced to reason alone. 

This is why I work with the human form. I am not interested in portraying identity, beauty, or anatomy for their own sake. I seek the moment when individuality becomes permeable when the body ceases to belong solely to itself and becomes the medium through which myth, memory, and primordial forces find embodiment. 

To me, the body is neither a prison nor an idol. It is a threshold of manifestation, where what transcends language briefly assumes a tangible presence. 

 

To be more specific, many of your works focus on the female body. Has your exploration of ancient traditions and religions influenced that direction? And what role does the female figure hold in your work, as well as in occult and ancient traditions more generally?

Absolutely. My fascination with ancient traditions, mystery cults, and the history of religions has profoundly shaped the way I approach the female body. 

The more I immersed myself in these worlds, the more I realized that the feminine was never a singular idea. It was never confined to motherhood, beauty, or gentleness. It was understood as a force capable of creation and dissolution, tenderness and ferocity, wisdom and temptation. The female body became a place where the unseen could take form, a living presence carrying birth and death, prophecy and ecstasy, desire and sacrifice within the same flesh.

I am particularly drawn to those figures who refused to be contained: women who embodied untamed desire, sacred transgression, ecstatic knowledge, or the unsettling power to lead others beyond the boundaries of the ordinary. They were often feared, misunderstood, or turned into symbols of danger precisely because they could not be controlled. To me, they represent sovereignty rather than sin. 

That understanding has deeply influenced my work. When I photograph women, I am not interested in portraying femininity as passive, flawless, or idealized. I seek a presence that feels older than identity itself—something untamed, contradictory, and impossible to fully explain. The women in my images are not simply subjects; they become presences that invite the viewer into a state of being rather than a narrative. 

Perhaps that is why my photographs often feel suspended between devotion and temptation, serenity and menace. I've never believed that truth resides only in what comforts us. More often, it reveals itself through what unsettles us, seduces us, and compels us to confront the deepest parts of ourselves. 

 

You also work with music and vocals, in Soul meanders. So to cross that threshold, death and decay are often the primary colors of the metal world, at least on the surface. But beyond the aesthetic and the element of shock, you’ve probably spent a significant amount of time engaging with death, mortality etc. through your work or studies. How has that shaped your personal relationship with your own death? Does creating art around it act as a kind of shield, or has it brought you closer to its reality?

.Death has never felt distant to me. In many ways, I came into this world with death already in my hands. From the very beginning, life and mortality were never separate realities in my experience, but two presences arriving together. Since I was three years old, death has continued to make itself known in different ways, so I never had the privilege of believing it belonged only to old age or to other people. 

For that reason, my work has never been an attempt to tame death or protect myself from it. Art is not a shield. If anything, it asks me to remain in the presence of what cannot be mastered. Some mysteries lose their depth the moment we pretend to explain them, and death is one of them. 

I've gradually come to see death not as the opposite of life, but as one of the forces that gives it form. Like night to day, winter to spring, decay to renewal, it belongs to the same rhythm. We suffer because we try to separate what has never truly been divided. 

Living with that awareness has changed the way I inhabit life itself. I no longer measure existence by its length, but by the depth with which it is lived. Mortality strips away the illusion of permanence. It teaches presence. It teaches reverence. It reminds me that every encounter, every act of creation, and every person I love is fleeting—and precisely because of that, sacred. 

So no, art hasn't distanced me from death. It has done the opposite. It has taught me not to look away. 

 

Allright, it might've been a rough start. Let's back up a little. First of all congratulations on the Abysm of Time EP, it’s killer. What made you reach for an instrument and your voice in addition to the camera? Was it something spontaneous, because why not, or did you feel that the image alone couldn’t carry everything you wanted to express? How did your music journey start?

Thank you so much! That truly means a lot.

I never really reached for music because I wanted to become a musician. I grew up in a family of musicians, so singing and playing the piano were simply part of everyday life. Music wasn't a conscious choice it was simply the language I was raised with. 

As an artist, though, my journey began much later through photography. For years, that was enough. I never felt the need to create music of my own. 

Then Soul Meanders came into existence, and something changed. I felt an incredibly powerful call toward music. It wasn't a calculated decision or an attempt to become a vocalist it felt like something I could no longer ignore. There were emotions, atmospheres, and ideas that couldn't remain only in silence or in images anymore. They needed sound. They needed a voice. 

Looking back, starting Soul Meanders feels less like choosing music and more like answering something that had been waiting for me all along. 

 

Music and photography, do these two parts of your creative life feed each other, or compete? Are they separate worlds, or part of the same whole? How do you balance them?

I don't think they compete at all. To me, they're different manifestations of the same creative impulse. They make love to each other. 

Even when I'm working on a photograph, music is already present. It shapes the atmosphere I'm trying to build, the emotional weight of an image, even the rhythm of the creative process. And when I'm writing music, I find myself thinking visually through light, textures, symbols, and composition. 

I don't consciously try to balance them. One naturally flows into the other because they both emerge from the same inner landscape. Sometimes an idea asks to become an image. Other times, it asks to become sound. I've learned not to force that choice, but simply to listen to what the idea itself requires. 

 

It takes incredible dedication to work as hard as you and many other multi-medium artists do. Having explored different aspects of your work, which naturally comes from within and exposes parts of who you are, from self-portraits to lyrics, you really put yourself out there. Given that, have you ever experienced insecurity when creating or sharing your work, especially in today’s world of algorithms and constant visibility? And whether you have or haven’t, what do you feel helps navigate those feelings?

At first, it was fucking terrifying. 

Not because I was uncertain about my work. I've always had a very clear sense of what I wanted to create and why. What frightened me was something else entirely: the moment of letting go. 

I've always known that once a work is shared, it no longer belongs only to me. It begins a life of its own, shaped by the eyes, experiences, and interpretations of others. In a way, it's like giving birth to children. You nurture them for a long time, but eventually you have to let them walk into the world on their own, knowing you can no longer decide how they'll be received. 

That realization has never made me want to hold back. Quite the opposite. It taught me that my responsibility ends with being honest while I'm creating. Everything that happens afterwards belongs to the work, not to my ego.

As for algorithms and constant visibility, I've learned not to confuse visibility with value. Algorithms change constantly; sincerity doesn't. If I ever started creating to satisfy a system instead of an inner necessity, I think I'd lose the very reason I make art. 

So yes, sharing my work was terrifying in the beginning. But not because I feared judgment. I feared the moment it would stop being mine and I eventually understood that this is exactly what art is meant to do. 

 

To end this on a more positive and a happy note. Quick fires. I will never get bored of these, I'm an evil person I know. Answer the first thing that comes to mind.

Film camera

Pentax 67

Favorite snack

Dark chocolate.

Finland

Moving there soon!

Eyes

Confessions.  

Dream collaboration

Tom Araya 

 

 

Allright, last one. Where can people find your work, and what is the best way to reach out to you, whether as a listener, a collaborator, or a band?

People can explore my work on my website, Falyriae, or follow my visual journey on Instagram at @falyriae. 

My music project, Soul Meanders, is available on all major streaming platforms. 

For collaborations, commissions, interviews, or any professional inquiries, the best and fastest way to reach me is via email at falyriaecontact@gmail.com. 

Whether you're a listener, a fellow artist, a band, or simply someone who resonates with my work, I'd be delighted to hear from you. 

 

That's it for now! I know there's definitely more we could have covered, but I encourage everyone to explore Falyriae’s work, maybe there will be a part two? Anyway, once again thank you. Feel free to share any upcoming plans regarding your music or photography, and any final words or shout-outs, this is your space.

First of all, thank you for your time and for such thoughtful questions. It has been a genuine pleasure to reflect on these topics and to share a little more about my creative process. 

As for what's ahead, I'm currently working on new photographic projects while continuing to develop Soul Meanders. There are several collaborations and ideas taking shape, and I'm looking forward to sharing them when the time feels right. 

I'd also like to thank everyone who has supported my work over the years whether through photography, music, exhibitions, publications, or simply by taking the time to engage with what I create. Every genuine connection is something I deeply value. 

Finally, thank you again for this opportunity. I truly enjoyed our conversation, and I hope this won't be the last one.

Stay wild!