Submerged Chronology takes the Roman oak piles of Trier’s first Moselle bridge as a point of departure and considers wood as a material record in which different temporal scales become physically legible. Constructed around 18/17 BC, the bridge was supported by oak timbers driven into the riverbed, where they remained submerged for almost two millennia. Eight of these piles were recovered in 1963 and subsequently dated through dendrochronological analysis.

The project is situated between the scientific reading of tree rings and the physical conditions that make such reading possible. Dendrochronology establishes chronology by correlating patterns of growth across successive rings, turning the tree’s biological development into a measurable temporal sequence. In the submerged oak piles, however, this chronological information is no longer present as an intact biological structure. Water, pressure, decay, and compression have altered the material while preserving fragments of its original growth. The wood therefore exists simultaneously as an archaeological object and as a physical register of duration.

Rather than reproducing the oak piles as historical objects, I work with the material traces produced through their long submersion. Distorted growth rings, cracks, compressed grain, and changes in surface structure are observed and extracted through drawing. These elements are progressively abstracted from their original material context and reorganized into linear systems. Drawing thus becomes a form of analysis, in which the surface of the wood is treated not simply as an image but as a structure containing information about time, pressure, and transformation.

The resulting drawings are developed as unfolded patterns, similar to templates used in paper model making. A pattern of lines appears initially as a two dimensional surface, while its relationship to an imagined three dimensional form remains latent within the arrangement. This structure introduces another temporal operation into the work: the drawing can be understood as a record of a form before or after its material realization, much like the tree rings function as a record of growth that has already taken place.

The work therefore moves between several modes of reading: archaeological dating, biological growth, material transformation, and spatial construction. The submerged oak becomes less a representation of the Roman bridge than a site in which different temporal systems intersect. Through drawing, these systems are reorganized into a visual language that asks how duration can be read when the material evidence of time is partial, altered, and physically embedded in matter.