Borrowed Glue, Borrowed Sign: A Basel Story

Some cities go smoothly. Basel, in June 2026, did not — and it's become one of my favourite stories in the whole project precisely because of how little went according to plan.

I arrived without my sign and without glue — both left behind, somehow, in the scramble of travel. That should have been the end of that leg of the trip. Instead, a friend from Hanover happened to have a spare sign with her, and simply handed it over.

Luckily, the universe had other plans. @freedomtoart from Hanover had my sign with her and could pass it on to me — she still had a spare one. Then I somehow found glue in an open Swiss supermarket on a Sunday!! Mission possible.

Glue was the harder problem. It was a Sunday, and most of Switzerland, famously, does not do retail on Sundays. Somehow, one supermarket was open, and somehow it carried exactly the kind of glue a ceramic plaque needs to stay on a wall through wind and weather. After that, it was a straightforward race across the city to actually place it before running out of daylight.

The next day, while I was still in Basel, I also left a small trail of 5=3 stickers around the city — a lower-stakes, lighter version of the same idea, meant for people to stumble across on their own without needing a whole wall dedicated to it.

None of this would have worked without other people showing up at exactly the right moment — a friend with a spare sign in her bag, a stranger's supermarket happening to be open on the one day it mattered. It's the same thread that runs through so much of this project: the friends who end up carrying a plaque, a sign, or a spare tube of glue when I can't manage it alone. Basel is a small, almost funny version of that pattern, but it's the same one that's let this project reach cities I never could have covered entirely by myself.

Basel taught me something I already half-knew: this project runs as much on other people's spare signs and open Sunday supermarkets as it does on anything I plan in advance.