OPI Lab is part of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. It is a practice-based research environment dedicated to a collaborative experimentation across art, architecture, and beyond, exploring ways to engage with our living environment. The Lab is located in OPI’s storefront in Gröndal, where we have initiated a new research field called Artistic Living Environment. Within this framework, we run a year-long advanced course and host other artist-researchers, including a PhD fellow. Short cycleEach year, our advanced course welcomes sixteen professional practitioners to a year-long program of ten week-long gatherings across ten months, dedicated to collaborative experimentation across art, architecture, and beyond. The ten gatherings in Gröndal, Stockholm, are structured around a program of practice-based research, lectures, seminars, workshops, conversations, and critiques – a format designed to stimulate knowledge exchange through learning and unlearning in a peer-to-peer setting.
Our headquarters resides in a storefront in Gröndal, Stockholm, an area undergoing significant transformation over the coming decade. The storefront is both a location and a form of spatial publication, a public(loc)ation. This is where we test, develop, and experiment by sketching and prototyping at a 1:1 scale in our living environment. The neighborhood itself becomes our atelier and its publics, contexts, and actors our conversation partners.
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This ongoing dialogue with the area seeks to build long-term trust, knowledge, and host the disagreements that are a part of public life and essential to create experimental projects towards our shared living environment.
This methodology informs how we continue to work in between each gathering in Stockholm, when the Lab participants follow their own practices and interests – using the area as a case study and starting point for various tests, sketches, and ideas. The focus is on developing methodologies and projects that explore ways of negotiating artistic values in diverse forms, formats, and materialities.
Importantly, we see this evolving methodology as a foundation for shaping future projects, methods, and practices elsewhere – beyond our particular location.
Learn more about the advanced course and how to join OPI Lab. Long cycleOPI Lab also serves as a research environment for other researchers, including a PhD fellow.
Our PhD fellow in Artistic Living Environment, artist Runo Lagomarsino, began in autumn 2025. His position is partly funded by The Knowledge Foundation through its Jubilee Doctoral Students initiative, which aims to promote collaboration between academia and industry.
The PhD position takes its starting point in OPI Lab’s ongoing case study in Lövholmen/Gröndal (Stockholm). Through OPI Lab’s methods and premises, the entire area becomes the doctoral researcher’s laboratory, where full-scale (1:1) experiments in collaboration can be carried out together with the neighborhood, existing networks, and new contacts established through the industry partners connected to the project.
Immersed in and surrounded by the very environment he is researching, the doctoral fellow develops his own research project alongside strategies and methods for how his project and artistic languages can operate within our living environment in new ways – and across new temporal perspectives.
