Introduction
Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab is a hub and laboratory that operates as a year-long advanced course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. We focus on and work with spaces referred to as public. Our foundation is the field of art and the different histories, discourses, formal and conceptual strategies that belong to it. However, we seek to engage in methods and approaches from multiple disciplines.
Working with the public means engaging with complex, often polarized contexts, and it demands that we question what, where, how, why and with whom we do things.
The OPI Lab group meets one week per month in a former storefront space in Stockholm – the base for the Lab’s work and research. Here, we are immersed in a neighborhood and can maintain a continuous dialogue with (a) particular place/site/situation/public(s). In this setting, we facilitate investigations and “public making” through experimentation and different participant-led projects with starting points in individuals’ practices and interests.
We explore practice-based thinking and doing though discussions, tests, sketches, prototypes, proposals and propositions. Projects initiated in the Lab are a way to experiment with and commit to integrating artistic values within our working processes. The mediums and forms of expression produced as part of these processes can be sculptural, conceptual, architectural, social, living, and/or participatory in nature.
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 professional practitioners: artists, architects, landscape architects, curators, cultural producers and people from other relevant fields. People interested in actively contributing to a peer-to-peer environment where different languages, practices and ways of understanding place co-exist to form an art and architecture laboratory.
Each year a new cohort comes together to participate in OPI Lab. The aim is 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, thereby affecting and shaping future work and their respective fields.
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.