Meet NOVA — a limited capsule collection of padel rackets inspired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access collection.

Instead of keeping centuries of art locked behind glass, I wanted to bring these masterpieces directly into play. Padel is dynamic, fast, and high-impact. By pairing ancient craftsmanship with performance carbon fiber, each racket becomes a true material rebirth — not just a print on a frame.

Video Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMWdmlPqhR0 FLORA Canvas: https://app.flora.ai/join-project/b0175763-2c3f-4e95-9763-dfc1f0f18ba1 Post on X: https://x.com/yurii_oleskiv/status/2096981092519551428

Featured artifacts from The Met Archive:

Length of painted silk: 18th-century French textile with floral bouquets on turquoise silk. The Met Archive - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/239345

Tunic: 15th–16th century Incan royal garment with iconic red-and-black checkerboard weave. The Met Archive - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/751901

Glass hexagonal amphoriskos: 1st-century Roman mold-blown cobalt glass vessel. The Met Archive - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/245376

Vase (Grueby Pottery): Early 20th-century Arts and Crafts vessel with matte cucumber-green glaze. The Met Archive - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/19839

Guitar: Late 17th-century European baroque instrument inlaid with ivory and tortoiseshell. The Met Archive - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/503932

Bottle with Birds and Peony Scroll: 15th-century Joseon porcelain decorated in cobalt blue. The Met Archive - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/37557

"Wild Rose" Lily vase: Late 19th-century Favrile blown glass designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The Met Archive - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/21617

Under the Wave off Kanagawa: Iconic c. 1830–32 color woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai. The Met Archive - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39799

Sweetmeat dish: 17th-century European segmented ceramic serving platter with radial patterns. The Met Archive - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/200731

Everything was conceived, iterated, and directed inside FLORA. The node-based canvas made it effortless to link raw archival references, dial in textures, and build cinematic promo renders & videos in one workspace.

A limited series built for the court today... that might just end up back behind the museum glass a century from now.

Created for the challenge by @FLORA x @Contra HQ . #FLORAMuseum #Contra

I'm impressed by your work! These padel rackets are insane, and the way you showed them are blowing my mind!

THE INSATIABLE DESIRE FOR DIVINE LOVE A short film by Mont Carver

Original artwork: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/360403

I spent hours moving through The Met’s Open Access collection before encountering Antonius Wierix II’s engraving The insatiable desire for divine love (Divini amoris intensio), created between 1570 and 1604. Among more than half a million works, this was the image that stopped me.

The engraving depicts a robed figure holding two hearts connected by fine lines to a crowned heart suspended above him. I was drawn to the way it gives longing a physical structure. It immediately connected with questions that already run through my work: queer love, faith, yearning and the unseen forces that bind people together.

The Insatiable Desire for Divine Love reimagines the engraving as a short magical realist film set in present-day Mexico City. A young Mexican woman prays before the image in her bedroom. The engraving awakens and becomes a prophecy. Later, she glimpses a luminous, long-haired figure. The apparition eventually returns in an ordinary human form as the girl living next door, whom she encounters on the rooftop while hanging laundry.

The divine revelation is not fulfilled through a distant celestial being, but through another young woman who has been living beside her all along. The film asks whether the love we address through prayer might already exist within the ordinary world, waiting to be recognized.

I developed the film through a branching process on the FLORA canvas rather than through a single generation. I began with visual research into Mexican domestic devotional spaces, bedrooms, neighborhoods, rooftops and clotheslines. From there, I developed the two characters and repeatedly refined their appearance, environments, visual continuity and relationship to the original artwork. I explored several interpretations of the apparition, rejecting images that felt overly polished or like generic digital fantasy in favor of something more intimate and slightly uncanny.

I also experimented with expanding and animating the original engraving while preserving its recognizable composition. Its engraved clouds begin to drift, the landscape responds to the wind, the hearts pulse and the delicate black lines tremble as though the antique image were awakening inside the paper. Across the film, those connecting lines are translated into the electrical wires and clotheslines of Mexico City. The pastoral landscape becomes a dense urban rooftop, while clouds reappear through white sheets moving in the wind.

The final visual language combines the tenderness of a magical-girl story with the texture of 35mm photography, domestic realism, devotional imagery and restrained analog dream effects. The dusty pink bedroom, faded turquoise textiles, warm daylight, black ink and pearlescent light were refined across connected iterations. Sound, music and an ornamental title sequence were developed as part of the same visual world.

The project also begins from the idea that some artworks have lives beyond museum walls. Devotional images can travel through reproductions, bedrooms and domestic altars, where they are framed, touched, prayed to and woven into everyday life. I wanted Wierix’s engraving to leave the digital archive and enter a young woman’s bedroom, not as a distant historical object, but as an intimate image she lives with and speaks to.

The film therefore traces a circular journey: from devotional print to museum collection, from the archive back into a home, and finally toward the museum again as a contemporary moving image. Rather than simply illustrating the original engraving, the work proposes a new afterlife for it, one in which sacred longing becomes domestic, Mexican and queer. IG post: https://www.instagram.com/reels/Dc-6_KgRaEV/

Woww that's so cool, amazing job! 🙌