This week, the cup is unapologetically strong and black. Lilia Di Bella takes it that way.

Lilia trained as a dancer. Movement shaped how she sees, thinks, and works. When she shifted to graphic design, she brought the dancer's questions with her: How does rhythm work on a page? What does color do to the body? Can typography create the same tension as a held gesture?

Based in Milan, she's spent the past decade with Archive, a publishing collective that treats design as a practice of openness and relational exploration. Together with Chiara Figone, she co-conceived Choreopoethics, a research stream exploring the body as living archive and choreographic strategies as tools for collective expression. In her teaching at NABA, she invites students to understand seeing as an active, embodied practice, a rehearsal for engaging critically and creatively with the world. She's drawn to texts that resist simple translation: articles with layered meanings or poetic rhythms that push her to find visual strategies echoing complexity without simplifying it. For her, design emerges from dialogue, not imposition.

This approach shaped her recent work on A Dance Mag's Structure & Flow issues. She treated color as choreographic matter. In Structure, fuchsia and brown create "a pulse of tension and release." In Flow, blues "carry the view forward, opening space, evoking air and depth." The expanded format gave her what any choreographer needs: space where sequences could stretch, pauses lengthen, transitions become fluid.

"The editorial content provides the pulse and intention; the design gives it rhythm, materiality, and space to unfold." For Lilia, every page is a stage. Every reader, a participant in an unfolding performance.

📖 On her nightstand: Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous “for its fragile intensity and the way language becomes a space to inhabit grief, memory, and tenderness." It’s novel that reads like poetry, where a son writes letters to a mother who cannot read, making language itself a gesture of love and longing.

📺 On her screen: Agnès Varda, Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse and Charlotte Wells, Aftersun. "Both feel like quiet acts of attention, collecting fragments of intimacy and time." Varda's documentary about gleaners gathering what's left behind, and Wells' meditation on memory and the gap between how we remember and what actually happened.

🎧 Listening to: Majazz Project Palestinian Sound Archive. "I recently discovered this project at Archive Milano and found it profoundly powerful." A digital archive preserving Palestinian musical heritage, collecting recordings, photographs, and oral histories that might otherwise be lost.

📍Favorite Place: Snowy top, crisp air, open horizon. The kind of place where your breath is visible and the world feels both vast and intimate.

🍲 Favorite Food: Warm broth. Salty licorice. One for comfort, one for the sharp contrast that wakes you up.

🎟️ Activity: Contemporary dance flow. Ashtanga yoga practice. Movement as thought, practice as presence.

Read the full interview

Find her essays "Fluctuating Structures" and "Structuring Flow" in A Dance Mag Issues 04 and 05.

Thank you for being here with us 🩷

See you next week,
Jana