Introduction
What is Of Public Interest?
Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab is a yearly advanced course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, situated in a practice-based research environment. The course is open to international applications from a diverse group of practices: visual artists, architects, landscape architects, curators, cultural producers, policy makers, and other associated fields. The group of 16 professional practitioners meets ten times during the year, each time for a week-long intensive session in Stockholm.
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 neighborhood of Gröndal in Stockholm. This space, together with the detail development plan that aims to transform 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 ongoing development plan, 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 – which each practitioner can apply to future projects, methods, and practices elsewhere, beyond this specific location.
Course 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.
Learn more about Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab: Visit Instagram here.
News
- The application period for the Royal Institute of Art’s Further Education courses in Architecture and Fine Art runs from 4 March to 15 April 2026.
- Applications are made via an application link that can be found under each course page during the application period.