Kursen ges på engelska The application period opens on 4 March 2025 and closes on 8 April Course syllabus: Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab 60 ects (pdf) Application instructions: Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab 60 etc (pdf) | |
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 isand 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.
Course Content
OPI Lab has its foundation in practice-based thinking and doing, as well as in facilitating peer-to-peer exchange. Crucially, this activity is carried out through 1:1 scale prototypes, tests, and sketch developments. We also work through workshops on tools, scripts, text and method, as well as individual and group discussions and critique, which feature invited guests.
The work undertaken at OPI Lab is closely tied to an engagement with the surroundings and each other. As a necessary component of building ideas through conviviality, OPI Lab hosts monthly Open Door Sessions where we offer food to create a public moment in our space as well as showing prototypes in the neighborhood. This format becomes a way to share, discuss, and test what we do with colleagues, friends, people from the neighborhood, and passersby.
The specific content for all these different formats is not set in advance. Based on the previous year’s activities as well as each ongoing session, it is continuously developed during the year in relation to the knowledge and work of each year’s specific OPI Lab participants and to the work and discussions that come from those participants.
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 (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), 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.
OPI Lab is developed and directed by artist and professor Jonas Dahlberg and led together with the curator, writer, and adjunct lecturer Jasmine Hinks. Visit us at our storefront at OPI Lab, Gröndalsvägen 1, 117 66 Stockholm.
Course Structure
Throughout the academic year the group meets one week per month in Stockholm for intensive sessions designed around a program of lectures, seminars, workshops, conversations and critique in a format that aims to stimulate knowledge exchange through learning and unlearning in a peer-to-peer setting. These sessions will also give space for immersive on-site research, individual work and multidisciplinary group collaboration. These 5-day blocks in Stockholm are mandatory, with a minimum of 80% attendance required on site.
OPI Lab participants work individually and collaboratively in smaller groups, with a departure point rooted in their own practices and in connection to immersive on-site research. The structure of the course focuses on developing methods and forms of “public making” as experiments within the scope and timeframe of the academic year, culminating in different public makings, prototypes and sketches and potentially a proposal for the future.
Peer groups of 3-4 people function as support structures that foster multidisciplinary work and enable focused critical feedback. Between sessions, participants continue to develop their individual and group work individually as well as in dialogue with their group and the course leaders as required. These parallel modalities allow for research and project proposals to develop at different paces, following the logic of each project, and for participants to collaborate with their peers in the Lab while maintaining focus on their own professional practice.
The on-site sessions for 2025/2026 are planned to take place in Stockholm as follows:
- 1st – 5th September 2025
- 29th September – 3th October 2025
- 3rd – 7th November 2025
- 1st – 5th December 2025
- 12th-16th January 2026
- 9rd -13th February 2026
- 9rd – 13th March 2026
- 7th April – 10th April 2026
- 4th – 8th May 2026
- 1st- 5th June 2026
Costs for travel and accommodation for the compulsory teaching weeks in Stockholm are covered by participants. In the event of study trips, additional costs may apply.
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Credits | 60 ECTS (100%) |
Level | Advanced level |
Language | English |
Entry Requirements | Degree of Master of Fine Arts, or a Master’s degree in another relevant field of study, or prior learning (equivalent professional experience). |
Selection | Selection is made based on an overall assessment of the applicant’s submitted work samples (maximum 5), a letter of motivation reflecting on why the conceptual frame of the course is relevant for the applicant and a CV. Interviews may be conducted as part of the selection process. |
Academic Year | 2025-2026 |
Responsible teacher | Jonas Dahlberg, Jasmine Hinks |
Contact | jonas.dahlberg@kkh.se, studera.postmaster@kkh.se |
Application Deadline
8th April 2025
Learn more about Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab: Visit Instagram here.