Al cerchio delle tue mani brings Bibi Tomasi’s photographs of early Italian feminist groups into a book drawn from the archive of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Tomasi was a poet, writer and journalist, and one of the bookstore’s founding members. Her photographs of gatherings and communal life therefore carry the perspective of a participant. The book makes that visual record available alongside the literary and political work for which she is known.

The subject is the life of a movement as it takes shape through relationships. Meetings and shared activity become evidence of how political commitments are lived among other people. Read in this context, the photographs invite attention to the connection between an individual maker and a collective history. Their preservation by the bookstore also matters: the archive belongs to an institution formed within the same movement, giving the act of assembling the book a continuing social context.

Giorgia Basch curated the volume and edited it with Jurgen Maelfeyt, who also designed it. An essay by Linda Bertelli and a text by Rosaria Guacci accompany the images; Catherine Salbashian supplied the translation. Published in November 2024 as the second title in BilderAtlas’s Eight Poems by series, the 128-page English-Italian edition uses Swiss binding and a slipcase, with two accompanying cards. One card carries a passage from Tomasi’s La sproporzione, bringing her writing into the physical ensemble.

For collectors, the interest is in this meeting of a participant’s photographs, an institutional archive and a contemporary editorial project. The first edition of 250 copies offers a specific material form for a history that extends beyond any one image. It is especially relevant to collections concerned with feminist image-making, collective memory and the recovery of women’s photographic work. The book received a special mention in the historical category at the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles book awards.