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Karl von Orb - Artist in Berlin, Germany

Gettysburg Address

2017

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Title

Gettysburg Address

Year

2017

Dimensions

28 × 22.5 cm

Material

Letter in wooden frame

Description

The address is treated as instruction rather than rhetoric. Words intended to orient a nation are converted into coordinates.

Once literalized, the speech leaves its historical moment and enters a system built for delivery, routing, and return. Meaning is no longer interpreted, but processed.

What comes back is not refusal, but incompatibility. The values remain intact, yet they no longer correspond to an address that can be reached.

Between promise and procedure, the work exposes a quiet displacement: that ideals formulated for continuity may persist in language, while losing their capacity to arrive.

What is returned is not the letter, but the question of where collective meaning can still be sent.