Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab

What questions would we ask—and which would we answer—if we were to create the conditions for artistic values to be implemented within similar time spans, schedules, scales and budgets as those of urban planners, politicians, policy makers and others responsible for constructing our shared living environment. More importantly: what kind of alternative imaginaries could we create?

Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab is a practice based multidisciplinary hub and research environment for professional practitioners. We welcome artists, architects, landscape architects, curators, cultural producers, policy makers, and people from other associated fields. The Lab operates a year-long advanced course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and serves as the research environment for other artist-researchers, including a PhD fellow.

Our aim is to develop new experimental works and methods for adding layers of artistic values into our shared living environment—values that could or should be of public interest. We do this through practice-based thinking and the actual making of 1:1 scale prototypes and propositions.

The foundations of OPI lie in the field of art and the different histories, discourses, formal and conceptual strategies that belong to it. That said, we seek to engage in methods and approaches from multiple disciplines. The mediums and forms of expression produced as part of these processes can be sculptural, conceptual, architectural, activist, social, living, and/or participatory in nature.

To provide the right conditions for our activities, OPI Lab has left the premises of our hosting institution the Royal Institute of Art and moved into a storefront space in in Gröndal in Stockholm. This space functions as a camouflaged site office, where the OPI Lab group meets one week per month. Our neighborhood, which is undergoing a complete transformation based on a new zoning plan over the next ten years, acts as our ongoing case study and as a test site where we can maintain a continuous dialogue with a particular place and its potential publics.

The neighborhood is complex, containing one of Stockholm’s oldest industrial areas as well as a rich history of other historical, and often opposing examples of what a city or a place is and where, how, why and for whom it should exist. In this setting, we facilitate investigations and “public making” through experimentation, prototyping and different participant-led projects with starting points in individuals’ practices and interests with means of also addressing places and publics beyond the given site and in our separate fields of work. The Lab strives to bring together a diverse group of people working with different approaches, with the belief that different backgrounds and life experiences are essential in shaping our public spaces and for an open society.

We seek a multidisciplinary group of 16 professional practitioners: artists, architects, landscape architects, curators, cultural producers, and people from other related fields. Candidates should be interested in actively contributing to a peer-to-peer environment in which different languages, practices, and ways of understanding place co-exist to form an art and architecture laboratory.

We see OPI Lab as a support structure that establishes ongoing relationships amongst participants and others through conversations, collaborations, and events that continue after the Lab year.

The aim is thus that everyone ends their Lab year with a new beginning. This could be arriving at a point where a longer-term project begins, or that the knowledge we produce together acts as a catalyst in participants’ own practices, affecting and shaping their future work and respective fields.

OPI Lab is developed and directed by artist and professor Jonas Dahlberg and led together with the curator, writer, and adjunct lecturer Jasmine Hinks. For more information on course content and how to apply visit here.