Takeout's Events Look Great on Instagram, but That's Just the Beginning

People order take-out food all the time. Why shouldn't brands and agencies order art and other services the same way?

That's the question that led Swiss artist Cris Cordero and her girlfriend, Venezuelan artist Elisa Sain, to launch Takeout, an endeavor they're calling the world's first "experience delivery service.”

"[Clients] tell us what ingredients they want, and we deliver," Cordero says. "We'll have clients that tell us the location or venue, their vision, and we'll come up with an idea and put it together. Take-out should be something easy to get. Traditionally, when brands wanted physical experiences for marketing, they would have to hire an agency. We're just two people, and we're consistent and very fast. Our hope is for people to say, 'For this event, let's get Takeout — it always works."

The two artists share a background in advertising. They met through mutual friends and immediately created a bond over art; specifically, they're inspired by how people consume and interact with these creations. They founded Takeout as a way to combine art and advertising to create new and exciting ways to engage audiences through brands, causes, and organizations.

"We're very passionate about art," Sain says. "But it's been the same for a very long time. People spend about two minutes looking at it, which is nothing compared to how people spend three hours on their phone stuck to their screen. With the experiences we curate, we make them so they look great on social media, but that's not our end goal. Our end goal is for people to... feel something."

Since Takeout's inception, the duo has worked with the Miami Design District, Fashion Fights Cancer, RAW Pop Up, and the National Federation of the Blind. During their Basel Braille event, Cordero and Sain hired blind performance artists to interact and engage with viewers in a new, meaningful way. Visitor engagement at that event surpassed seven times the average time people spent at art shows, they say.

Both believed that by creating physical spaces and impressions that cut through the superficial relationships on social media, people could interact with art and develop a feel for it. They compare it to Refinery29's 29Rooms event and the work of Santa Fe company Meow Wolf — but better.
"There are a lot of pop-up experiences, but a lot of them are solely Instagrammable," Cordero says. "We try for our work to start by being Instagrammable but that not being the result. Yes, of course, we value good marketing and excellent branding, but we want to take you further into what we are doing — into real life and real appreciation of a moment."

Their experiences have been attended by thousands of visitors and won international prizes such as a D&AD Pencil, a Summit Creative Award, and an Applied Arts Award for young and emerging creatives.

Their upcoming exhibition, "The Coronation," concentrates on ridding creatives of self-doubt and aims to empower them as kings and queens focusing on personal achievements and goals. Attendees will be invited to create crowns based on materials in a box provided by Takeout. Sain and Cordero will personally deliver the boxes with materials to each person who RSVPs to the event.

"The idea of 'The Coronation' came from a conversation we had at home about being immigrants. As people who are not from the U.S., we feel like we have to prove our value and our worth, whether it be in the education system or visa system and so on," Cordero says. "We're always trying to prove our excellence and worth in the country. We're so focused on the people we're compared to, and [inspiration] grew out of the exhaustion of comparisons. People could all use a break from that. We wanted to take a moment to be proud of this Takeout craziness, and then we thought, We're sure a lot of people deserve this break too."

"The Coronation." 5 p.m. Saturday, November 17, at Balagan Art Space, 1657 N. Miami Ave., Unit 503, Miami; thecoronation.splashthat.com. Tickets cost $40.