Emanuela Fletzer

IED Roma

Jewelry Design, Year 3

21 years old

Rome, Italy

Schools have been among the first institutions to adapt to the new measures of quarantine. What are the pros and cons of online classes? 

The educational system immediately to the crisis, especially colleges. In the specific case of university, we only needed a moment to reflect on the re-organization of our places, that are fundamental in the learning especially here at IED Roma (I'm talking about labs and tools) to follow the students in their individual creative path. Those places and tools changed face: we had to find them in the small angles of our homes, in those rooms that we turned into our class, fulfilling them with papers, sketches, graphic tablets and computers to follow online classes. Personally, as a million other students in Italy, living my last year in this condition made me think a lot about the value of the human touch that we feel when we physically go to school. It changes a lot the perception of the path you are following. Our Institute, in particular, as a professional print like no others and they shape the professionals of tomorrow with full frontal classes and many practical activities. For sure, this quick change upset each one of us' creative route, but we didn't give up and we are still ready do adapt. Adapting is the key word to this historical moment and it is the biggest pro that the IED community is teaching us right now.

The Fashion and Design Industries have been aggressively afflicted by the COVID-19 emergency. As a consumer, but also as a future insider of those systems, what will be the worst consequences of this crisis? 

There is no doubt that these industries are suffering from the general stop: every event, show, runway, meeting has been canceled; they could have been the best chance to start again, helping to turn on the motors of the bright machine called "Made in Italy", the real leading industry in our economy. The worst consequence, in my opinion, is that everybody wants to come back to what we were living before. "Change" is the key word and we need to understand this word to lead us to a complete re-thinking of the frenzy world of fast fashion and waste: is all that we have really necessary? The worst consequence for me will be to not go over towards a new experience of design itself. We need to start a new era made of humanity, self-consciousness and progress.

Your work is built on creativity. Where do you find your inspiration in this moment?

I would like to answer to this question with a funny episode that happened to me. It is no secret that this quarantine made us eat much more, because of the plentiful amount of time we had in our hands and the need to fulfill the boredom, maybe with a home-made cake. So, my creativity fed itself: but it made it with silence and peace, all those moments due to isolation. I fed it with researches, webinars, online courses, movies and lectures. I can say for sure that we always ignore the sound of our inner creativity, we leave it on the background of our daily routine, we let the noise cover it. In these days, we heard a lot of silence in the streets, so that it made us complain about solitude. Though, in that silence I could hear my ideas and my creativity: they were screaming, they were ready to reinvent themselves and face a new era of creativity.