Cor Serpentis

Purple icebergs, acidic oceans, and a biome that would kill anything human.

Ivan Yefremov set that world on a planet circling the brightest star of Serpens. What would a living forest smell like out there, under the light of a strange star, and would any of it be relatable to an earthling? Blackcurrant answers with a sulfuric undertone, the signal a human nose picks up from very far off and reads as danger. Pine absolute, rare enough that few work with it, is overdosed until it reveals a sort of strange, luminous acidity. Vetiver roots tangle through an alien soil where everything is breaking down.

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.