The third virtual roundtable of the Nordic Insights project brought together cultural practitioners from Romania, Republica Moldova, and the Nordic countries to explore how artistic interventions can transform contested public spaces.
Oana Nasui, cultural researcher, Formare Culturala, host
Niels Righolt, cultural developer, cultural facilitator, director CKI – The Danish Centre
for Arts and Interculture
Jonas Dahlberg, artist and professor at the Royal Institute of Art in
Stockholm, director Of Public Interest (OPI)
Laura Panait, urban anthropologist and community developer
Facilitated by Niels Righolt from the Danish Centre for Arts and Interculture, the session featured two complementary perspectives: Jonas Dahlberg’s conceptual framework developed through high-profile memorial commissions in Scandinavia, and Laura Panait’s seven-year community engagement project in Cluj-Napoca.
Jonas Dahlberg, a Swedish artist and professor, traced his evolution from gallery-based video art to public space interventions, describing how the cancellation of his winning memorial design for the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks—stopped by local opposition just one month before construction—prompted him to establish Of Public Interest (OPI), a platform operating at the intersection of art, architecture, and community engagement.
He introduced his “pinball method,” a non-linear approach to project development where initial artistic ideas remain deliberately abstract, bouncing between questions of where, how, why, who, and what as they encounter specific places and publics.
Central to his practice is the concept of “double ontology”—interventions that function simultaneously in multiple registers, like the Oslo Opera House serving both a niche art form and as expansive public gathering space, or Michael Rakowitz’s inflatable shelters that provide warmth for homeless individuals while also operating as artwork and urban policy critique.
Laura Panait offered a counterpoint rooted in Romanian realities, tracing the development of artistic public space interventions from the subversive poster campaigns of the Mindbomb collective in 1990s Cluj through the professionalization enabled by EU integration and cultural funding.
Her detailed account of the La Terenuri project in Mănăștur—Cluj’s largest neighborhood with 100,000 residents—illustrated how sustained community engagement, temporary architecture built from recycled materials, and strategic combinations of local culture with participatory planning eventually pressured municipal authorities to transform an abandoned communist-era site into a public park. The outcome, while diverging from the community’s more interdisciplinary vision, demonstrated that persistent grassroots pressure can achieve structural change even within resistant institutional frameworks.
The discussion that followed explored the tension between participatory ideals and institutional realities, particularly the “new public management” logic that demands quantitative metrics ill-suited to artistic and social interventions working at human scale. Both speakers emphasized the importance of “digging where you stand”—developing deep engagement with immediate contexts rather than parachuting into distant communities—while acknowledging the fundamental challenge of citizen-authority distrust that shapes public space work differently across European contexts.
The session concluded with reflections on how artists and cultural practitioners can maintain their specific languages and values while navigating the complex landscape of urban transformation, funding constraints, and political pressures.
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More about the “Nordic Insights” project here
The “Nordic Insights: addressing cancel culture in public spaces through artistic dialogue and cultural innovation” project is implemented by the Formare Culturala platform from Romania. It is funded by the Nordic Culture Fund through the Globus Opstart+ program, which supports artistic and cultural projects that connect Nordic countries with other regions of the world, encouraging long-term collaborations and networks that promote artistic development and experimentation.
