Free Stickers, Real Streets: Introducing the 5=3 Sticker Pack

Every material the 5=3 project has used came from necessity as much as from design. The first plaque, a single hand-cut shard of glazed ceramic left in Paris in May 2024, was slow to make and slower to place — you cut it, you glaze it, you fire it, and then you carry it, sometimes across a border, hoping the piece survives the trip in one bag. Porcelain came later and was more durable, but no faster. By the end of 2025 I wanted a format anyone could use without a kiln, a kitchen table, or a plane ticket. That is what became the sticker pack.

I worked with an illustrator on the design, going back and forth over which version of "5=3" felt honest rather than decorative — we did not want it to look like a slogan. What we landed on stays close to the original ceramic pieces: plain, legible, unafraid of the equals sign doing the emotional work instead of any illustration around it. The pack is free to download and print, sized to work on ordinary paper and standard label sheets.

Why Give It Away

The project was never about how many plaques exist in how many cities. Sixteen plaques in a year, scattered from Brazil to the Netherlands, will always reach fewer people than a format anyone can reproduce at home. A sticker costs nothing to make and nothing to place, and that changes who can take part. You do not need to travel, glaze, or fire anything — you need a printer and five minutes, and you can leave the same formula somewhere it might reach someone who needs it that day.

Stickers also travel differently than ceramic. A friend can slip a sheet into a suitcase pocket and place one in a city I have never been to. I can also simply add a set myself to a wall that already carries a plaque — the way a set went up on a wall in Paris — and the sticker pack was made for exactly that kind of quiet, unplanned handoff, the same way earlier plaques ended up in places because someone else happened to be going there anyway, the way one made it onto a wall in Basel with nothing but borrowed glue.

Because the sticker pack is downloadable, it also solves a problem the physical plaques never could: reach. Not everyone lives near a city where 5=3 has left a piece, and not everyone can wait for one to arrive. Now anyone, anywhere, can print the formula and decide where it belongs — on a lamppost, a noticeboard, the back of a laptop, wherever feels right to them.

If you want your own numbers on a piece instead of the standard formula, that is possible too — the sticker pack sits alongside the option to write your own X = Y, or to ask for something more personal, the way one person did after we met at an art exhibition and she asked if I could make a plaque with her numbers instead of mine, numbers that later became part of the larger artwork being built from everyone's submissions.

The formula on the sticker is the same one that started in Paris: X equals the number of times you were pregnant, Y the number of children you are raising. For most people the two numbers match. For about one in four, they do not. The sticker does not explain any of that on its own — it just leaves the door open, in whatever city it ends up.