Bad Wolf

No boss to please, no rent to pay, no lines to stand in.

An animal at the edge of a cliff, singing into the night, symbolises nothing so much as freedom, and the howl is a force that cannot be tamed. "All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is," Margaret Atwood wrote. The hunting ground is done in many colours of the woody spectrum: Virginian cedar for warmth, Texan for a dry bark astringency, Chinese for the smoke of a distant fire, Moroccan for sweet resin. A French pine absolute, an in-house specialty, supplies the emerald green. Wild daffodils, fresh and intoxicating, shed light on the mossy nooks and passages in the undergrowth.

Nos Republic grew out of an eponymous blog, Ksenia Golovanova's first Telegram channel on the subject. The name comes from res publica, a public affair, and rests on the idea that smell is the rawest and least filtered sensation available, and therefore the one that levels people from very different countries and cultures.

The stories start in Golovanova's own culture and are built to carry past it: the longing for space, or a city seen at night from the top of a tall building. Seven releases now, each credited on its own page to the person who made it, Stéphanie Bakouche on four of them and Cristiano Canali, Valery Mikhalitsyn and Maria Golovina on one each. On several products Golovanova signs a material story herself and leaves the rest to the maker.