With the Call Calcuta walking tour, artist trio Rimini Protokoll are exploring what would happen if India’s army of call center operators got personal on the phone.

Like German companies who have rushed to India to take advantage of low labor costs, the artists “outsourced” their project. They hired ten people in Calcutta, set them up in a call center and trained them in a basic script detailing routes and landmarks in a neighborhood in Calcutta and in Berlin.

For the rest, the operators can improvise and bring in their own voices.

Unlike the operators in India’s call centers, dubbed “John” and “Sara”, who adopt British and American accents to disguise their origin, the performers sound Indian and human as they guide, flirt, play-act and even sing their way around on the tour.

Besides, the artists have woven in the history of colonial India’s struggle for independence into the Kreuzberg district where the “Call Cutta” tour is set.

For example, you can be instructed to peer underneath a dustbin to find a picture of Subhas Chandra Bose, a freedom fighter who spent time in Berlin trying to recruit Hitler’s help in fighting the British.

At the end of the tour, you can finally see the operator/performer waving at you from a screen in the window of a consumer electronics store.

“People here might know a lot about India and the call center boom,” said Daniel Wetzel, one of the artists in the group. “But all that knowledge doesn’t help in countering unfair clichés if you’ve never really spoken to or had a real exchange with an Indian.”

The “Call Cutta” tour runs until June 26, 2005.

Via Deutsche Welle.