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.
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.
OPI was born from a cancellation. In 2018, after nearly four years of work and just one month before construction was scheduled to begin, Dahlberg’s winning proposal for memorials commemorating the victims of the 2011 terror attacks in Oslo and on Utøya was cancelled. The cancellation was a political decision, taken in response to a lawsuit against the Norwegian state filed by a small group of nearby residents, led by a local populist right-wing politician.
The questions that emerged in the aftermath — concerning the role of art in our living environment; public mourning; political control; and media, governmental, and institutional oversight — led Dahlberg to establish Of Public Interest (OPI).
OPI’s starting point is the belief that our shared living environment should be a host for and a place where a polyphony of voices — often with conflicting interests — can coexist, and that art should be one of the strong voices playing an active part in our society.
Central to OPI is 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.
Of Public Interest is located in a storefront in the residential area of Gröndal in Stockholm. This neighborhood forms our context and 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 become our conversation partners.
This locality and its proximity to different publics form a foundation for developing our thinking and methods in relation to place — applicable to projects beyond this specific location.
