Why Georgia: The Most Personal Plaque in the Project

Of all the cities that now carry a 5=3 plaque, Georgia is the one that isn't really about the project at all. Every other city was chosen because I happened to be there, or a friend was, or an exhibition brought me nearby. Georgia was chosen because it had already chosen me, years earlier, in a way I didn't understand until much later.

In 2016, I traveled to Georgia while pregnant for the second time. It was a five-day trip, and I remember feeling unwell for parts of it — nothing dramatic, nothing that felt like an emergency, just a persistent unease I mostly attributed to travel and to pregnancy itself, which has its own long list of ordinary discomforts. Nothing about those five days felt alarming enough to act on. I came home from that trip the way you come home from any trip: tired, glad to be back, assuming everything was fine because nothing had told me otherwise.

What the ultrasound found

It wasn't fine. Back home, an ultrasound found no heartbeat. The pregnancy had stopped at some point I couldn't pin down, possibly during the trip itself, possibly around it — there was no way to know exactly when, only that by the time anyone looked, it was already over. That gap between when something actually happened and when I found out about it is a specific kind of disorientation. You start re-reading your own memory of recent days looking for a moment you must have missed, some sign your body was already telling you something you didn't hear.

Georgia, in my memory after that, stopped being simply a country I'd visited and became attached to the loss itself — not because anything about the place had caused it, but because it was the last place I'd been while still, as far as I knew, carrying that pregnancy forward. That kind of association isn't rational, and I never thought it was Georgia's fault in any sense. But memory doesn't organize itself rationally. It attaches feeling to whatever was nearby when the feeling formed — which is close to what actually stays with you once the immediate moment has passed.

Georgia wasn't responsible for what happened. But it was the last place I was, before I knew.

Going back on purpose. When the 5=3 project reached Georgia in October 2024, it wasn't a stop chosen for visibility or convenience. I went back specifically to place a plaque there, deliberately, because I wanted my next memory of that country to be one I'd made on purpose, rather than one that had simply happened to me. Standing there again, years later, doing something intentional and calm in a place that had only ever been the backdrop to something frightening and confusing — that changed the shape of the memory more than I expected it to.

I don't think placing a plaque erases what happened in 2016, and I wouldn't want it to. The point wasn't to overwrite the memory but to add something to it: a second, later visit where I was in control of what the trip meant, where I chose to be there and chose what to leave behind. Now when I think of Georgia, there are two trips layered on top of each other instead of one — the unplanned, uneasy one, and the deliberate, quiet one where I finally got to decide what that place would hold for me.

Most of the cities in this project are marked on a map because a piece of ceramic sits somewhere on one of their walls — not so differently from the way a second Armenian plaque later found its place among ancient stone columns. Georgia is marked on the map for that reason too, but underneath it, for me, it's marked because I finally went back and made peace with a five-day trip I'd been carrying, half-examined, for eight years.