Central to OPI Lab is an interest in our shared living environment and in navigating 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.

What is Of Public Interest is not a specific agenda, but rather the insistence that our living environments are places where a polyphony of voices, and often conflicting interests, should be able to co-exist. The course facilitates explorations in how to work beyond existing frameworks, sometimes working critically within them – and at times through negotiating values (spatial, architectural, sculptural, conceptual, political and more) that are overlooked, unasked for, or even unwanted.

The setting for the ten week-long sessions is a storefront in the residential part of Gröndal in Stockholm. This neighborhood, together with a zoning plan aimed at transforming the industrial area on the nearby waterfront into new housing, forms a context and a case study that functions as a container for experimentation and exploration for different interests, professional knowledge, creative approaches, and skills.

The storefront is where OPI Lab takes place, but it 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. Through initiating spatial, architectural, sculptural and conceptual interventions, performative interactions (and more), the neighborhood itself becomes our atelier; its publics, contexts, and actors our conversation partners.

We do not work with a fixed annual course thematic; instead, the course leaders and the group of participants observe and respond to the neighborhood, its development, and the people involved – all of which are constantly changing. The OPI Lab methodology is grounded in listening to these ongoing shifts, allowing subjects and thematic directions to emerge through participants’ interests, practices, and their developing relationship and understanding of this specific site.

This locality and its proximity to different public(s) form a foundation for developing methodologies and projects in relation to place – applicable to future projects, methods, and practices elsewhere, beyond this specific location.

The participants end their OPI Lab year with a public event where they share scale 1:1 prototypes of their work in the public sphere, alongside propositions for how to develop those concepts, projects, or new forms of practice over a longer timeframe. To end with a new beginning.

Each of the ten mandatory gatherings is structured around a program that supports the needs and interests of the specific group. The sessions combine practice-based workshops with lectures, seminars, conversations, and critiques — facilitating a space and format designed to stimulate knowledge exchange through learning and unlearning in a peer-to-peer setting. In between each gathering, participants develop their own practices and interests through individual and group work.

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.

In the past we have invited a wide range of guests to speak with us at OPI Lab.

These include: Danh Vo, Sumayya Vally, Oscar Tuazon, Joar Nango, James Taylor-Foster, Sophie Goltz, Meriç Algün, Lara Almarcergui, Pilvi Takala, Amol K Patil, Hendrik Folkerts, Sandra Mujinga, Lap-See Lam, Asrin Haidari, Manuel Cirauqui, Sissel Tolaas, Jill Magid, Jumana Manna, Lea Porsager, Runo Lagomarsino, Assemble, Cooking Sections, Joanna Warzsa, Stephen Wright, Raqs Media Collective, Carlo Ratti Associati, Alexander Eriksson Furunes and Sudarchan Khadka Jr, Wael Al Awar, Monument Lab, Ken Lum, Katie Paterson, Katarina Pirak Sikku, Can Altay, Unscene Architecture (Madeleine Kessler and Manijeh Verghese), Olivia Plender, Nato Thomson, et al.
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The on-site sessions for 2026/2027 are planned to take place in Stockholm as follows:
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31st August – 4th September
28th September – 2nd October
2nd – 6th November
30th November – 4th December
11th – 15th January
8th – 12th February
8th – 12th March
5th – 9th April
3rd – 7th May
31st May – 5th June

OPI Lab is an advanced course held at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. It is developed and directed by artist and professor Jonas Dahlberg and led together with the curator and writer Jasmine Hinks as adjunct lecturer.