The Project's Furthest Stops: Havana and Rio de Janeiro

Most 5=3 plaques travel with me. A handful travel without me, carried by friends who happen to be going somewhere the project has not reached yet, and two of the farthest examples of that are a wall of street art in Rio de Janeiro and a colonial street in Havana.

Rio came first, in May 2025. The plaque went up beside an established stretch of street art in the city — the kind of wall where the surrounding work already tells you that whatever gets added has to hold its own alongside serious painters, not just occupy blank space. Placing 5=3 there meant fitting the formula into a visual language that was already loud, dense, and specific to that city, rather than treating the wall as empty.

Carried, Not Mailed

Almost none of the international placements happen because I flew there myself. Most start the same way: someone I know is already going somewhere, and a plaque or a sheet of stickers goes into their bag along with everything else they are packing. That was true for Rio, and it was true for Havana, where a plaque made its way onto a colonial street thanks to a friend crossing the Atlantic — not a project trip, just a person willing to carry something small and place it carefully once they arrived.

This way of working has shaped the project as much as the ceramic itself. A plaque that only I could place would only ever exist in cities I chose to visit. A plaque that a friend can carry goes wherever that friend was already headed — which is how a project about one formula ends up in a specific, unplanned scatter of cities rather than a curated list. Havana was never on a map of "next stops." It happened because someone was going there anyway and thought of the project when they packed.

The map of this project is really a map of who was traveling, and when.

There is something fitting about that for a project built on a private, personal formula. The 5=3 plaques do not arrive in a city with an opening event or a curator's plan. They arrive the way the numbers themselves arrive in most people's lives — quietly, carried by someone, without much warning, and placed wherever felt honest at the time. A colonial street in Havana and a mural-lined wall in Rio de Janeiro have almost nothing in common as places, except that both now carry the same small formula, put there by people who cared enough to bring it along.

It also means the project depends on trust in a way a solo effort would not. Handing someone a plaque and asking them to find the right wall, at the right height, in a city I may never see myself, means giving up control over exactly how and where it lands. So far that trust has held — every friend who has carried a piece abroad has placed it somewhere it belongs, and sent back a photo that tells me it arrived safely.

Rio and Havana are, for now, among the furthest points the formula has reached — one on a wall built for street art, the other on a street built centuries before either of us were born. Neither city knew the project was coming. That is closer to how pregnancy loss actually enters most people's lives too: without an announcement, discovered rather than scheduled, and, if you are lucky, met by someone who was simply willing to show up.