Of Public Interest (OPI) is a platform focused on negotiating artistic values within our shared living environment. We believe in the potential of working through a camouflaging practice — creating projects that act as spatial double agents, where imagination meets critical thought and a genuine interest in how one’s practice meets a place, its context, its histories, and publics.

OPI is multidisciplinary and operates across art, architecture, and related fields. It is structured around two distinct components: OPI Lab — a research environment and advanced course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, dedicated to practice-based research, knowledge production, and methodological and project development around the role of art in shaping our living environments; and OPI X — a studio environment and incubator dedicated to initiating, developing, and implementing projects.

How Of Public Interest (OPI) began

In 2014, artist Jonas Dahlberg won the international competition to create memorials commemorating the victims of the 2011 terror attacks in Oslo and on Utøya. The proposal was never realized after a small group of nearby residents filed a lawsuit against the Norwegian state. The group was led by a local politician representing the Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet) — the same party the terrorist had previously been a member of.

In response to the lawsuit, the government cancelled the project after four years of work — just one month before construction was scheduled to begin. The questions that emerged through this process led Dahlberg to start Of Public Interest (OPI).
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What is Of Public Interest

Of Public Interest is not a specific agenda, but rather the insistence that our living environments are places where a polyphony of voices — often with conflicting interests — should be able to coexist.

Our location

Of Public Interest is located in a storefront in the residential part of Gröndal in Stockholm. This neighborhood — together with a zoning plan aimed at transforming the nearby industrial waterfront into housing — forms the context in which we work. The storefront 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. The neighborhood itself becomes our atelier; its publics, contexts, and actors our conversation partners.

This locality and its proximity to different publics form a foundation for developing methodologies and projects in relation to place — applicable to future work beyond this specific location.