"We don't do it here," says an actress named Zoe. "We just talk about it." It is a Parisian exhibition called Call Girl, created by Toronto-born Nadine Norman, and features Zoe and seven other actresses in what the Times of London says is a role "fixed somewhere between prostitute and sex therapist."
The paper says visitors make appointments to see Zoe and her seven co-performers - Nadine, Simone, Demiane, Lara, Bette, Penelope, or Lola - with their numbers distributed on blue cards around Paris and a footnote that it is "100 percent dialogue". But the footnote is small enough that many might miss it.
Some customers think they're meeting a real call girl, but only when they arrive at the Canadian Culture Centre behind France's Parliament do they get the hint. They go into a yellow waiting room, the Times says, then onto a sofa for a personal encounter with one of the women, who smile but offer no sex.
"We are exploring the issue of women's availability and putting in place the conditions for a human exchange that is troubling and creative," Norman explains. "This is a fragment of human culture. Is that not art?"
It may or not be art, but it is a hit. The actresses are booked until the exhibition closes at February's end. The visitors include Members of Parliament, diplomats, Left Bank intellectuals and frustrated voyeurs alike, the Times says.
Says Zoe to the Times: "This is a place of paradox and ambiguity. I'm not a therapist, so all I do is listen. But . . . can you imagine the effect if I was to hitch up my skirt and roll around on the sofa as someone was telling me the innermost secrets of his marriage?"
