OPEN CALL: OPI Lab 2026/2027 at Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm

How can practitioners working in art, architecture, and related fields create their own conditions, define their own roles, initiate their own projects, and negotiate values that might be overlooked—or even unwelcome—in contexts where they are not even invited?

Public space—our shared living environment—should be a place where a polyphony of voices, and often conflicting interests, can co-exist. At Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab we believe in the potential of working with the built environment as a camouflaging practice, creating projects that are spatial double agents.

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.

The setting for the ten week-long sessions is a storefront located in the residential neighborhood of Gröndal in Stockholm. Together with a zoning plan aimed at transforming the industrial area on the nearby waterfront into new housing, the neighborhood forms a context and a case study—functioning as a container for experimentation. This locality and its proximity to different public(s) form a foundation for developing methodologies and projects in relation to place—applicable to future projects, methods, and practices elsewhere, beyond this specific location.

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.

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.

Each of the ten gatherings is structured around a program that supports the needs and interests of the selected group. The sessions combine practice-based workshops with lectures, seminars, conversations, and critiques—facilitating a space and format designed to stimulate knowledge exchange through learning and unlearning in a peer-to-peer setting. Certain moments in the program take place at the Royal Institute of Art, where participants also have access to workshops and other facilities. In between each gathering, participants develop their own practices and interests through individual and group work.

Participants are expected to be confident in their field of work and knowledge and interested in sharing it with others. By working individually as well as across disciplines, participants contribute to and complement each other’s work beyond their own areas of expertise. For a list of previous guest lecturers see here.

The on-site sessions for 2026/2027 are planned to take place in Stockholm as follows: August 31–September 4 / September 28–October 2 / November 2–6 / November 30–December 4 / January 11–15 / February 8–12 / March 8–12 / April 5–9 / May 3–7 / May 31–June 5

OPI Lab is an advanced course held at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. It is developed and directed by artist and professor Jonas Dahlberg and led together with the curator and writer Jasmine Hinks as adjunct lecturer.

Visit OPI Lab at our storefront space located at Gröndalsvägen 1, 117 66 Stockholm. Follow OPI Lab on Instagram @opi_lab.