La jaune Schreibmaschine
Multilingual poet, typewriter artist, socio-artistic project developer and researcher
About me
I’m Veronica Juliana Schmalz, in art La jaune Schreibmaschine. My artist name honors my first typewriter, a yellow Adler Tippa S I got at a church flea market, mixed with the initials of my second name and surname, combining Spanish/Italian (La) with French (jaune/ yellow) and German (Schreibmaschine/ typewriter).
Growing up in a multicultural family with Chilean-Argentine and Italo-German roots, between Buenos Aires and la Sicilia, languages and migration stories have characterised my life since a very young age. In fact, home, identity, languages and relations are key topics I explore in my works. After an academic career spent in South Tyrol, Germany and Trentino, I moved to Belgium for a PhD in computational linguistics in 2021. It is here that my artistic career has bloomed.
My style is characterised by the combination of my home languages, Italiano and Español, with the languages I have been learning, namely Nederlands, Français, Deutsch, English and Português. Translanguaging poetry, the simultaneous use of more languages as part of my linguistic repertoire, is for me a way to rediscover the magic and playfulness we experienced as children during language acquisition, while also staying close to my multicultural and multilingual story.
“Our reality is becoming increasingly multilingual. Literature should also reflect this turn. Poetry, as a free and experimental genre, lends itself well to to hosting multiple languages at once. (…) Why should I surrender to choosing one among the multitude of my soul’s lenguas (tongues)? The aim of my poetry is not for the reader to understand every word, but to let them enter and explore the multilingual, diverse universo that inhabits me — greeting the languages that constitute the foundations of my persona, and the realities and relations around me.”
Services
Projects
Multilingual stories in ons nieuwe thuis: Kortrijk
Bringing multilingual stories among international nieuwkomers in Kortrijk to life through creative writing and multimedia workshops with a resulting multilingual poetry collection and a podcast. Supported by Durf2030.
Multilingual poetry to support foreign language learning
What if instead of pushing home languages out of language classes we embraced them and used them to support the new language learning through translanguaging practices? In this project, we use multilingual poetry as a means to bridge between home language(s) and the new country language(s) for efficient learning with adult learners. A project in collaboration with Babbelplus and Stad Kortrijk in occasion of the Poëzieweek 2025.
Multilingual collages for migrant children's Dutch learning
Migrant children need to be given the tools to learn how to manage living in multilingual realities. They might speak one language at home with their parents, one at school, another one in their free time. Through multilingual collages, we bring these realities to life on paper, analysing how they coexist and how they can support each other. They have unique resources and skills but need to be able to exploit them.
Multilingual personalised typewritten poems
What a better way to remember a special event like a wedding or birthday, attending a festival, hosting a vernissage, closing a teambuilding initiative than through personalised multilingual poems, typewritten on the spot, on an iconic typewriter? You share a story, a memory or a word with me, and I carefully craft a unique piece for you to take home and remember such a singular and peculiar interaction. No big event ahead, but still want to write a special poem for a loved one? I also send personalised multilingual poems via post!
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