What is Of Public Interest? Today, as the conditions that shape how we live together rapidly shift and polarization deepens, so do the attempts to direct, censor, and contain the landscapes where we work. For professionals in our fields, it is increasingly difficult to find the financial and spatial room for maneuver required to develop experimental practices and projects. Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab is a practice-based research environment that is part of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. OPI Lab seeks to gather a group of professional practitioners working in art, architecture, and beyond to join a program of ten week-long gatherings across ten months during 2026/2027. What connects us is an interest in our shared living environment and in navigating how to initiate and realize projects within it – sometimes beyond existing frameworks, sometimes by working critically within them – and at times through negotiating values that are overlooked, unasked for, and even unwanted. Our living environment should be a place where a polyphony of voices, and often conflicting interests, can co-exist. What is Of Public Interest is not a specific agenda, but rather creating projects informed by artistic values, where imagination meets critical thought and a genuine interest in how one’s practice meets a place, its context, its histories, and publics. We see our headquarters – a former storefront space in a residential neighborhood in Stockholm – and the changing industrial area in which it is situated, as a foundation for our work developing methodologies and projects in relation to place. Together, this forms a case study that functions as a container for experimentation and explorations between our different interests, professional knowledges, skills, and creative approaches. The storefront is where we work, but it also acts as a form of spatial publication, a public(loc)ation. Here we test, develop, and experiment with multifaceted artistic languages and methodologies through sketching and prototyping at scale 1:1 in our living environment. The neighborhood itself becomes our atelier; its publics, contexts, and actors our conversation partners.
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We welcome 16 professional practitioners to join OPI Lab and take part in ten week-long gatherings across ten months, dedicated to experimentation across art, architecture, and beyond. The gatherings in Gröndal, Stockholm are structured as a practice-based research framework that includes lectures, seminars, workshops, conversations, and critiques — a space and format designed to stimulate knowledge exchange through learning and unlearning in a peer-to-peer setting. In between each gathering in Stockholm, participants continue to develop their own practices and interests – using our case study as a starting point for practice-based thinking and doing.
Participants are expected to be confident in their field of work and knowledge, and interested in sharing it with others. By working individually as well as across disciplines, participants contribute to and complement each other’s work beyond their own areas of expertise, adding perspectives, layers, and feedback. At OPI Lab, the year is conceived as something that concludes with a new beginning — a foundation from which each practitioner can shape future projects, methods, and practices elsewhere — beyond the specific location of Gröndal. Learn more about the advanced course and how to join OPI Lab.
OPI Lab is part of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and is developed and directed by artist and professor Jonas Dahlberg and led together with the curator, writer, and adjunct lecturer Jasmine Hinks. Visit us at our storefront at OPI Lab, Gröndalsvägen 1, 117 66 Stockholm. Of Public Interest (OPI) is a platform operating across art, architecture, and beyond. OPI comprises three entities: OPI Lab for research and education, OPI Public for public work, and OPI X for initiating, supporting and developing projects.
