The Press Cake

Using the press cake, Marlène Huissoud transformed into a table sunflower seeds and beeswax, waste collected from the oil and vinegar company Gegenbauer.

The Press Cake is a collaboration between Studio Marlène Huissoud and Gegenbauer, a oil and vinegar company based in Vienna.

The project, commissioned by Passionswege for the Vienna Design Week, is born from Marlène Huissoud’s fascination for the pellets – the leftover of the oils – and the machine which extracts those materials by compressing and heating the seeds of the different plants.

Huissoud adapted this machine in order to create hundreds of straight sticks from sunflower seeds and poured them in a beeswax base to maintain all of them bonded together.

The challenge of this project was to only work with materials from the company and the beeswax has been found in their roof where they have beehives. Once the base of the tables was done, she have added on top and on the bottom part of the tables sunflower seeds to remind us where the waste material was from.