The New Beauty Council (NBC) project, in its different forms and shapes, is about the multiple perceptions of urban space and design. NBC’s work includes performances, public projects, speaker series, urban curating and collaborations that engage innovative strategies of production as well as dialogues. NBC investigates how concepts of the public are constituted and how beauty and ugliness can be (re-)defined. Using the idea of the carnivalesque as a method, NBC engages with organizations and institutions, which shape and interpret cities through public conversations and staged situations. The founding members are Annika Enqvist, Anna Kharkina, Thérèse Kristiansson and Kristoffer Svenberg.

A recent project is Changed Perspectives c/o Stockholm City Museum – comprising four public talks about living in and making use of Stockholm as a city. These conversations were curated and performed by Annika Enqvist and Thérèse Kristiansson.1 The research and subjects of the series in general, and one of the talks; Whatever Blows Our Trumpet in particular, are the basis of this paper. Lounging the NBC as a collaborative initiative, building the website, producing the public talks and curating other works have been a part of the practical part of my MA project.