Annamaria Olsson founded Give Something Back to Berlin over a decade ago, working on migration, integration, and countering xenophobia. Her current project, Stories from the Beauty Parlor, grew out of a single conversation in a Berlin salon and has since taken her into nail salons in Kosovo, drag spaces in Tbilisi, hammams in Morocco, and even hair salons doubling as bomb shelters in Ukraine.
In conversation with Lara Habboub, Communications Lead for the Democracy & Belonging Forum, Olsson talked about how these ordinary spaces are doing serious democracy work: “The people working in these salons are informal community influencers, trusted, embedded and present. In times when trust in institutions is collapsing, engaging authentic community influencers in vibrant third spaces such as beauty salons carries huge potential for more traditional ‘democracy work’.”
Annamaria also speaks about organizing through a global feminist backlash, what she has learned from feminist organizers in the Global Majority who have navigated authoritarianism before, and why her project is working to redirect resources from the beauty industry to the grassroots feminist organizations on the sharpest end of this backlash.
