From One Plaque in Paris to More Than Twenty Cities

When my husband placed that first hand-cut ceramic shard in Paris in May 2024, I had no route planned, no list of cities, no sense of what would come next. I knew I wanted to make a second piece, and maybe a third. I didn't know that within roughly two years the project would have touched more than twenty cities across four continents, or that most of that growth would happen because other people decided, on their own, to carry it further than I could carry it myself.

The early expansion was slow and mostly mine. Two months after Paris, we placed two plaques in Vienna on the same day — one plain, one with an explanation of what a missed miscarriage is. Then Georgia in October 2024, a trip that mattered to me for reasons far beyond the project itself. Then, in November 2024, something shifted: a friend put up a plaque entirely on her own initiative, without me there, without me even asking. That was the first sign the project could exist as something bigger than one person's ceramics.

Cities, materials, and the people who carried both

From there the map filled in unevenly, the way real life does rather than the way a marketing plan would. Tel Aviv in late 2024. Rehovot in Israel in March 2025, where a large ceramic plate cracked apart in the kiln and, instead of being a failure, became five smaller plaques instead of one — an accident that multiplied the project rather than ending a piece of it. Yerevan in April 2025, where a plaque a friend placed accidentally ended up partly covering a mural by a Colombian street artist; I tracked him down through a reverse image search and an old news article, messaged him, and he was gracious about it — a real lesson, learned the hard way, about never placing a piece on someone else's existing work.

Materials shifted alongside the geography. The first pieces were hand-cut, glazed ceramic shards — rough-edged, individual, each one slightly different from the last because each was cut by hand. By June 2025, in Madrid, we introduced cast porcelain, which let the formula sit on a more uniform, more repeatable surface. That same month brought a genuinely new format: a street poster made entirely out of real pregnancy tests, arranged to spell out 5=3 — the first time the project moved outside ceramics and porcelain altogether. June 2025 also marked one year since Paris, and we marked it by returning there with a new plaque, plus new pieces in Luxembourg for a second time and in Amsterdam for the first.

A friend places a plaque on her own trip, without being asked. That's when a project stops being one person's work.

What twenty-some cities actually add up to. By the time 2025 ended, sixteen plaques had gone up that year alone, stretching from Brazil to the Netherlands, including the first piece made as a personal commission — for someone I met at an art exhibition who simply asked, "can you make one with my numbers?" — and the first free, downloadable sticker set, made with an illustrator, so that people who will never have a friend traveling to their city with a ceramic shard in a suitcase could still put the formula up themselves. London followed in January 2026. A rock formation outside Yerevan called the Symphony of Stones became the site of a small piece of land art built around a second Armenian plaque that same winter. Lisbon welcomed a plaque with rain. None of this was planned two years earlier in Paris. It accumulated one decision at a time — mine, a friend's, sometimes a total stranger's.

What strikes me most, looking at the map now, isn't the count of cities. It's how many of those plaques exist because someone other than me decided to carry one somewhere I hadn't been and place it themselves. The project's growth was never really about scale for its own sake — more cities isn't a goal in itself. It's about how many separate hands, in how many separate places, were willing to have one honest, quiet conversation with a wall, on my numbers' behalf or their own.