Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab is a practice-based research environment that is part of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

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 program and host other artist-researchers, including a PhD fellow funded by The Knowledge Foundation.
OPI Lab programToday, 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.

Each year OPI Lab seek 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 from September - June. 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.

How can we create the conditions where we can define our own roles, initiate our own projects, and negotiate values that might be overlooked – or even unwelcome – in contexts where we often are not even invited?

Our living environment should be a place where a polyphony of voices, and often conflicting interests, can co-exist. We believe in the potential of working with the built environment as a camouflaging practice, creating projects that are spatial double agents. What is Of Public Interest is not a specific agenda, but rather creating projects informed by artistic values, where imagination meet critical thought and a genuine interest in how one’s practice meets a place, its context, its histories and publics.

The core of our methodology in OPI Lab is our headquarters in a storefront in Gröndal, Stockholm — an area undergoing significant transformation over the coming decade. We see our storefront, and the 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.

Our aim is that everyone ends the Lab year with a new beginning and build a foundation for shaping future projects, methods, and practices elsewhere —beyond the specific location of Gröndal.