Lina Alarabi – Scholarship recipient, Ung Svensk Form 2026
Scholarship: Oddbird
SEK 15,000 to a project focusing on social sustainability and inclusive design.
White balance and margin of error
Vitbalans (White Balance) is my thesis project from the Graphic Design and Illustration program at Konstfack 2025. The project explores the connection between normative whiteness and marginalization in knowledge formation.
A central part is an interactive sculpture in the form of an unbound stencil block. The motif is based on my tracings of enslaved, exoticized people from racist school posters from 20th-century Sweden. The sculpture consists of over 100 laser-cut stencils in colored paper and transparent Plexiglas in A5 format. The figures are removed in layers to create depth and dimension. The order of the stencils can be changed to vary the expression in color and form.
Taking my cue from Elsa Beskow's idyllic depictions of white Swedishness, among other things, I create alternative narratives with the stencil and redraw the figures in new contexts to comment on how the school's biased knowledge transfer and standardized tools shape our perspectives.
The illustrations are collected in a 150-page publication, where even conversations and text are designed based on the idea that the "neutral" is placed in the middle and the radical is pushed to the margins. Helvetica and Times New Roman are used in the center; the voices in the margins speak through non-Latin fonts without å, ä, ö – which limits both readers and speakers.
The work is rounded off with a homemade beige version of the Swedish flag, hoisted during the spring exhibition. The flag was livestreamed around the clock as a commentary on Swedish neutrality, exclusionary symbols, and a threatened national self-image.