Call Cutta In A Box is a strange interactive theater installation where the audience, one at a time, converses with an employee of an Indian call center. Indeed, the production was created by art group Rimini Protokoll in collaboration with the Callcenter Descon Limited in Calcutta. The installation is currently on tour, traveling next to Gronigen, Copenhagen, and Paris. The Guardian's Gideon Lewis-Kraus answered the phone in Dublin. From The Guardian:
She ticks off what she knows about me: my age, my profession, my relationship status, my satisfaction with life, my health, and tells me that I am a Category 3G. I ask what that means and she says that in a callcentre they are encouraged to typecast their callers as personalities, because that helps them understand what the caller wants, and how they can best help the caller, or how they can best sell to the caller what they are trying to sell – insurance or a vacation or a credit card.
Scene III is about images. She directs my attention to a picture on the far wall of Descon Ltd's headquarters and says that, if I look in the upper right-hand corner by the big X, I can see where her office is, though she is in the back, not near the window. She also tells me that she is three and a half hours ahead of me, so that I should imagine not the partly cloudy sky of the photograph, but an amber sunset.
Call Cutta In A Box review,
Call Cutta In A Box project page, Call Cutta blog
