Interior Scholarship | Blog 02 | Mona Schaffer

Cuba permeates my thoughts and my designs

I view interior design as an interdisciplinary subject in which space, materiality, colour and experiences come together. During my studies in Germany, I developed a vision to create emotional atmospheres for rooms that are characterised by light, colours and natural materiality. Since I continued to feel an inhibition to use colours and emotions in Germany, I was drawn to spend a semester abroad at ISA in Havana.

Cuba challenges me. It gets me to look at what I have learned from different perspectives and intensifies each action, each feeling and each perception of space. The impression of new smells, sounds, colours and customs and the indescribably beautiful architecture of my campus fascinated me each day.

All of these conditions permeate my thoughts and help me to fill the previously imagined rooms with new colours, to redefine room contours and provide rooms with new shapes. It is the "white silence", which I often perceived in German rooms, that is disrupted by these impressions. It is a silence that provides an opportunity to withdraw and a silence that I value greatly. However, it is also a silence that has been waiting to be filled.

Cuba permeates my thoughts and my designs. The new impressions and strong feelings that I experience here fill the white, silent room and help me fulfil my desire of imagining rooms with strong colours and new shapes and to fill them with emotional atmospheres.

About Mona Schaffer

Mona Schaffer initially studied media and communication studies for two semesters to learn more about visual and audio-visual communication. She then transferred to the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design and began her interior design studies. In the 2016/2017 winter semester, Mona studied scenography at ISA (universidad de las artes) in Cuba. In order to allow her to completely focus on her studies, Mona will receive the "Interior Scholarship" – the Sto Foundation's AIT scholarship. In the 2016/17 academic year, it is being awarded to four interior design students who stood out through their pronounced attitude and creative way of thinking. The scholarship comes at the perfect time for Mona Schaffer and it will pay for part of her stay abroad.