Sixteen Plaques, One Year: 2025 in Review

By the last day of 2025 the project had placed sixteen plaques over the course of the year, scattered from Brazil to the Netherlands, plus a new poster format and the first ever sticker set. I did not set out with a target number. The count only became visible in hindsight, when I sat down at the end of December to write out everywhere the formula had gone.

Some of those sixteen were straightforward repeats of what the project had already been doing since Paris in 2024: a hand-cut or cast plaque, carried somewhere, placed carefully, photographed, left. Others were not straightforward at all. In Rehovot, Israel, in March, a large ceramic plate cracked apart inside the kiln — the kind of failure that usually means starting over. Instead it became five smaller plaques instead of one, each carrying the same formula, spread out rather than lost. Some of the year's better moments came from mistakes like that one, where the material had its own say in what the piece became.

New Formats, New Reach

2025 was also the year the project stopped being only ceramic. In June, a street poster built entirely out of real pregnancy tests went up, spelling out "5=3" at a scale no plaque could match. Later in the year, working with an illustrator, the project produced its first free, downloadable sticker pack — a format anyone could print and place themselves, without a kiln or a plane ticket. Between the poster and the stickers, the project reached people who would never have found a ceramic plaque tucked into a wall, simply because the new formats did not require finding a wall at all.

November brought the most personal moment of the year. At an art exhibition, someone I had just met asked a direct question: could I make a plaque with her numbers instead of mine? It was the project's first commissioned piece, and it changed how I think about what 5=3 is for. The project started as my formula, then became an invitation for other people to write their own numbers on paper or on a wall themselves. A commission is a third thing — someone trusting me to make their numbers physical, on their behalf, in ceramic that will outlast the conversation that produced it.

The numbers on that commissioned piece were not mine, and that was the whole point.

The year also had its share of return visits — a second plaque in Tel Aviv, given to myself as a birthday gift in October; a second Yerevan piece placed in November not on a city wall but out at the Symphony of Stones, a natural formation of basalt columns near Garni, arranged into a small, deliberate land-art setting with two friends. That one felt different from anything placed in a city — no pedestrians walking past, no urban wall, just stone that had been there far longer than any of us, holding a formula about how fragile a single life can be.

None of this happened according to a plan drawn up in January. It happened because friends kept traveling, kept offering to carry a plaque or a sheet of stickers, and kept finding walls, streets, and, once, a rock formation that felt right. Sixteen plaques is a number I can point to. The year itself was really just a long string of individual yeses — from a kiln accident in Rehovot to a question asked at an art show in November — that added up to something bigger than any one of them intended.