Daniel Gasol’s proposal starts from the idea that it is not possible to understand the persistence of hygienism without attending to the techniques through which the archive itself manufactures otherness. Research with the files of Vagos y Maleantes and “Peligrosidad social” (Social danger) has made me aware that judicial documentation is a device that produces subjectivities. This occurs in the act of naming, classifying, and describing, and so, the laws end up constructing the figure, the human type or subject whose existence must be contained, segregated, questioned. This idea guides the exhibition: not so much exhibiting documents and artifacts as unfolding the operation through which these documents became weapons of humiliation and, at the same time, involuntary repositories of desire
Reading against the grain, in this sense, is not a rhetorical technique but an ethics of intervention. Counter-reading implies critical discourse, attention to the margins, and a reparative dimension, transformed here into a curatorial procedure. In each piece and in each room, the aim is to question the version that case files and manuals want to tell, doing justice to the gestures, affects, and resistances that judicial records attempted to turn into evidence of dangerousness. This methodological movement consists of: 1) dismantling medical and legal rhetoric; 2) listening to the fissures (lapses, altered phrases, material remnants) that allow lives to be reconstituted; 3) gaining a reparative dimension that does not soften the damage but makes it visible and politically legible. This methodology is articulated with the exhibition pieces so that the show does not reiterate the police gesture of enumeration, but interrupts it.
The genealogy that is of interest here exposes continuities: the religion that sanctions “abnormality,” the science that pathologizes it, and the law that administers it form an assemblage of power. Tracing these continuities from the archive implies pausing to examine how each device translated intuitions into concrete procedures, this means, the forensic gaze that attributes a gender and sexual identity; the reading of a judicial text that theatricalizes guilt; the photocopy of an intimate letter that becomes evidence. Repression not only erased, it also produced traces, with paradoxes such as the destruction of certain material (conventional heterosexual pornography) juxtaposed and intertwined with the methodical preservation of queer eroticism and intimacy as punitive evidence. This archival paradox dismantles the logic that safeguards male privileges while turning dissidence into an indelible mark.
The exhibition can be understood in terms of methodological praxis: vitrines that not only contain objects but make explicit the administrative gesture with which they were produced; fragmented archives displayed alongside counterpoints such as oral testimonies. This resource—the deliberate juxtaposition between the voice of the medico-legal authority and the bodies subjected to it—functions as a narrative repair technique that forces the audience to feel the dissonance and not settle into a single reading. The curatorial politics here is inspired by microhistory and the poetics of the fragment, showing the roughness of the sources without cleaning or sanitizing them, maintaining discomfort as part of the work of memory.
From a theoretical perspective, the works of critical thinkers such as Foucault, Hartman, Muñoz, Preciado, and Benjamin are interpretive tools that make it possible to understand that the measurement of the body has always been political; that the biomedical approach inherited theological prejudices; and that legislation acted as an administrative translator of moral mandates. But above all, the exhibition proposes a methodological lesson. Science claimed objectivity and, in doing so, remade the repertoire of faith, while the law institutionalized this synthesis in practices of exclusion. Exhibiting files of dangerousness next to analyses of forensic technique, or placing police photographs beside testimonies of resistance, helps visualize this translation between languages.
The reparative approach proposed by Daniel Gasol is the ethical horizon of the installation. It is not only about denouncing; it is about restoring agency: allowing the people represented in the documents to recover their voices through oral history, archival restitution, and the symbolic return of materials. The example of Antoni Ruiz’s file and his work of reclaiming archival holdings functions here as a protocol. The exhibition incorporates participatory processes in which the affected communities take part in the reading and interpretation of the material. This operation returns to the archive its experiential dimension and avoids the aestheticization of pain.
Finally, from the present, the project exposes the continuity of hygienism in its contemporary forms: biopolitics, necropolitics, and the health economy that turns care into a commodity. Showing a genealogy that goes from the witch hunts, to hygienist campaigns, psychiatric pathologization, and laws of dangerousness—with contemporary resonances such as trans pathologization or the surveillance of racialized bodies—forces us to understand the exhibition not as a museum of the past but as a critical tool for the present. The queer methodology that Daniel Gasol puts into practice consists of reading silences, caring for affects, and sustaining discomfort, and becomes a strategy for disabling the hygienist apparatus by forcing law, science, and religion to see themselves in the murky mirror they themselves created.
The curatorial proposal that emerges from this methodology is not nostalgic: it is an intervention. It invites us to sustain impurity as a political form, to maintain the dirty as a space of resistance, and to use the archive to repair without domesticating. Reading case files against the grain ceases to be an academic gesture to become a public practice, exposing how otherness was created is also showing how to question it.