A Week Across Northern Germany

Some weeks bring one city. The last week of August into early September 2026 brought four — Berlin, Bremen, Bremerhaven, and Hanover, one after another, in the kind of stretch that makes the German leg of this project feel less like a series of separate trips and more like one long, continuous one.

Berlin came first, on August 23rd, one of several visits the city has had by now — it's quietly become one of the project's most-returned-to places. From there it was on to Bremen, a quieter stop along the way, and then to Bremerhaven for something a little different: the plaque shown at a real art festival, at @artspace_bremerhaven, rather than left on a street corner on its own.

Bremerhaven. Art Festival @artspace_bremerhaven.

Hanover came next, installed at the Linden Street Art Gallery — a name I'd actually gotten wrong once before, mistaking a photo of it for London before the caption set me straight. This time there was no confusion: a deliberate stop at a real, working street-art space, exactly where a project like this belongs.

The week closed back in Berlin again, a plaque going up for what felt like the fourth or fifth time in that city alone. By the time it was over, four cities in one country had absorbed a week's worth of ceramic “5=3”s, glued to walls a few hundred kilometres apart, each one placed by the same tired, glue-stained hands.

Trips like this one are also where I notice how much this project has grown past anything I could have mapped out at the start. Basel taught me that a missing sign or an empty tube of glue doesn't have to stop anything — something always turns up — and Germany, city after city in a single week, taught me the opposite lesson: sometimes there's more momentum than one person can keep pace with alone. I still find it strange, and a little wonderful, to watch a private, personal habit turn into something with its own geography.

Weeks like this are exhausting in the best way. They're also, I think, the clearest evidence that this project has stopped being a single gesture and become something closer to a habit — one that keeps finding new walls, in new cities, faster than I can always keep track of.