Girls Supporting Girls: The Friends Who Carry Plaques Around the World

5=3 is often described, understandably, as Anna Maslennikov's project — her formula, her losses, her plaques. That's true as far as it goes, but it undersells something that happened almost immediately: other women started carrying plaques themselves. Paris got the first piece in May 2024, placed by Anna's husband, and Vienna followed two months later with two plaques on the same day. But by November 2024, something changed — for the first time, a friend put up a plaque entirely on her own initiative, with no prompting, no accompanying trip from Anna. That single act turned 5=3 from one artist's project into something closer to a network.

What makes that shift matter isn't logistics, though logistics are part of it — a plaque packed into a suitcase alongside someone else's regular luggage, wedged in next to shoes and a phone charger, carried through an airport like contraband nobody's looking for. It's that the friends who've done this weren't hired, and they weren't simply being helpful in the generic sense you help a friend move apartments. Each of them chose to physically transport an object about pregnancy loss into a city and place it in public, on their own judgment, at their own risk of an awkward conversation if someone asked what they were doing.

Cities that came from someone else's suitcase

Some of the project's most memorable placements exist only because a friend was already headed somewhere. Limassol, Cyprus, in October 2025, was carried there by a friend rather than by Anna. Yerevan, Armenia, got its first plaque in April 2025, and then a second in November 2025 — this one arranged as land art at the Symphony of Stones near Garni, put together by friends Matrokhina and Marina Nikitushkina, who took the piece past a single wall-mounted plaque and into something closer to a collaborative installation among the natural basalt columns. Neither of those moments needed Anna on-site. They needed someone who already cared enough to do the work of finding the wall, the light, the right spot.

None of this was ever meant to stay a solo act — the project grew because other women decided it was theirs too.

There's a specific kind of trust involved in handing your own project to someone else's hands, especially a project this personal. Anna's formula is about her own body and her own five pregnancies, and yet she's let friends choose where a plaque lands, how it's arranged, whether it sits alone on a wall or becomes part of a larger scene. That decision — to let go of control over placement — is itself a form of the project's message. The point was never that only Anna's numbers count. If a friend places a plaque in a city Anna has never seen, the formula still says exactly what it needs to say, because the formula was never really about her specifically. It was about the arithmetic that a lot of women quietly share.

Every plaque that arrives somewhere by way of a friend's suitcase rather than Anna's own hands is proof the project doesn't depend on one person's travel schedule to keep growing. It depends on other women deciding, independently, that a wall in their own city needed this too — and that's a sturdier kind of growth than any single artist could manage alone.