Of Public Interest (OPI) is a multidisciplinary platform operating across art, architecture, and related fields. Our mandate is to initiate, develop, and produce methods, concepts, and projects in which artistic values shape our shared living environment.

Of Public Interest (OPI) is structured around two distinct components: OPI Lab — a research environment and advanced course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm; and OPI X — a studio environment and incubator where projects are initiated, developed, and realized.

The platform was founded and is directed by Jonas Dahlberg.

In 2018, Dahlberg’s winning proposal for memorials commemorating the victims of the 2011 terror attacks in Oslo and on Utøya was cancelled — after nearly four years of work and just one month before construction was scheduled to begin.

The cancellation came in response to a lawsuit against the Norwegian state filed by a small group of nearby residents, led by a local politician from the Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet) — the same party the terrorist had previously been a member of.

The questions that emerged in the aftermath — concerning public mourning, political control, and media, governmental, and institutional oversight — led Dahlberg to establish Of Public Interest (OPI).

It is of public interest that our shared living environment be a place where a polyphony of voices — often with conflicting interests — can coexist, and that practitioners in art, architecture, and related fields can, when necessary, create their own conditions, define their own roles, initiate projects, and negotiate values that may be overlooked — or even unwelcome — in contexts where they are not invited.

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 nearby industrial waterfront into housing — forms the context in which we work. The storefront 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 publics form a foundation for developing methodologies and projects in relation to place — applicable to future work beyond this specific location.