[…] Three girls, three boys, and so few options. Hélène et les garçons, the iconic sitcom of the 90s, has lulled generations of barely pubescent teenagers and housewives under the age of 50 

[…]. From the beautiful Helen, a pushover, to Cricri d’amour’s mug, the audience identified with this hyper-conditioned gang of students, embodying gender stereotypes that are now largely outdated. […] Performed by three queens of the night (Gio Ventura, Babouchka Babouche and Shlagazza la Casse), the AB Productions classic is transformed into an extravagant, free, and inclusive show that shatters all the gender conventions. The project unfolds in two parts: on the day of the opening, the Hélèn.e performance is acted out on site, in public and filmed, and then in the second part, it is broadcast within the shooting space itself. The scenography of what becomes the exhibition, largely taken from the original sets, is revisited by the artist in a mural form, which plays on the effects of perspective and trompe-l’œil to create the illusion. Adding make-believe to farce, Sitcom adopts the form of entertainment to better disturb the sexist economy of its representations. 



[…] Tony Regazzoni revisits the emblematic settings of the series, created with an economy of means that reinforces their apparent artificiality. […] Binary and sexist, the layout of the places in the show reflects all the clichés that the drag queens will happily trample on in their high heels. Usually reduced to taking care of themselves and seducing the boys, these Helene, Cathy and Johanna of another gender emancipate themselves from their assigned roles and take power as if they were seizing a stage. 



[…] Plunged into the heart of the backstage area, [the (tele)spectator] become aware of the sitcom’s false realism and the contingency of social constructions, confronted with the spectacle of the fluidity of genres. Because in the end, where is the caricature? In the smooth and watered-down femininity of trashy shows or in the realness of these confident creatures? An imitation without true originality, as Judith Butler posits in Gender Trouble, drags appear here as a powerful means of breaking away from the fantasised archetypes of the feminine and mocking their rigidity. If we agree with them that gender is “performed”, with Lacan that identity is a “masquerade” or with Goffman that every social role is a “parade”, then we must see here how femininity is above all an act, a game irreducible to available brain time.

Hélène and the tomboys, by Florian Gaité