Edible Landscape Exploration by Regina Hügli

The Sponge Cake Buffet is a performative “edible landscape exploration” by Regina Hügli, created 2025 as part of her artistic research into sponge structures and the sponge family, “Sponge Project.” The intervention offers a gustatory journey through various hydro-social spaces around the world and an encounter with the temporal dimension of absorption and becoming informed. It invites viewers to make pleasurable, surprising discoveries and encourages reflections on bodies of water and the ecosystems and cultural spaces they co-create.

In a performative act, sponge cakes are drizzled with aromatic, fluid “soaks” and soak up the flavors and textures of these creams. The diverse taste experiences of the soaks reflect the food culture, vegetation, colors, and smells of specific hydrosocial spaces. The characteristics of the respective regions along bodies of water are translated into a suitable recipe based on in-depth research by Regina Hügli in collaboration with Renate Burger/AMÚR WIEN.

Sponge Cake Buffet featuring 12 River Soaks:
Fluid Interdisciplinarities Festival Berlin 2025

The Fluid Interdisciplinarities Symposium and Festival in Berlin in October 2025 brought together international researchers from the arts and sciences who use interdisciplinary methods to study rivers and other bodies of water.
The festival was organized by Humboldt University of Berlin and the Helmholtz Institute for Cultural Technology; invited guests included researchers from IHE Delft, Wageningen University (NL), and the University of Montpellier (FR). The festival’s concept was developed by Regina Hügli (One Body of Water) in collaboration with Pauline Münch (IRITHESys, Humboldt University of Berlin).

The “Sponge Cake Buffet featuring 12 River Soaks” for approximately 100 guests served as the festive conclusion to the festival and brought to life the hydro-social spaces of 12 rivers around the world. The research for the recipes was based on questionnaires that the festival’s researchers had filled out in advance. The Sponge Cake Buffet facilitated multisensory encounters with waterways around the globe, which were thus experienced not merely as objects of research, but as active participants and creators.