Of Public Interest (OPI) is a platform operating across art, architecture, and related fields, structured around two distinct components: OPI Lab — a research environment and advanced course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, dedicated to practice-based research, knowledge production, and methodological and project development around the role of art in shaping our living environments; and OPI X — a studio environment and incubator dedicated to initiating, developing, and implementing projects.

Central to OPI is an interest in our shared living environment and in navigating how to initiate and realize projects where imagination meets critical thought and a genuine interest in how one’s practice meets a place, its context, its histories, and publics.

What is Of Public Interest is not a specific agenda, but rather the insistence that our living environments are places where a polyphony of voices, and often conflicting interests, should be able to co-exist.

Why Of Public Interest (OPI) was founded.

In 2014, artist Jonas Dahlberg won the international competition to create memorials commemorating the victims of the 2011 terror attacks in Oslo and on Utøya. The proposal was never realized after a small group of nearby residents filed a lawsuit against the Norwegian state. The opposition was led by a local politician representing the Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet) — the same party the terrorist had previously been a member of.

In response to the lawsuit, the government cancelled the project after four years of work — just one month before construction was scheduled to begin. The questions that emerged through this process led Dahlberg to start Of Public Interest (OPI).

Where are we?

Of Public Interest is located in a storefront in the residential part of Gröndal in Stockholm. This neighborhood, together with a zoning plan aimed at transforming the industrial area on the nearby waterfront into new housing, forms a context where we work, but it also acts as a form of spatial publication – a public(loc)ation – for testing, developing, and experimenting with multifaceted artistic languages prototyped at scale 1:1. The neighborhood itself becomes our atelier; its publics, contexts, and actors our conversation partners.

This locality and its proximity to different public(s) form a foundation for developing methodologies and projects in relation to place – applicable to future projects beyond this specific location.