VISITS COMMENTED BY THE CURATORIAL TEAM: REGISTRATION
Public Hygiene: society as a sick body is a project build around the artist Daniel Gasol work, reflecting, since the present, about the relationship between legislation, science and religion that criminalises, medicates and punishes those who do not comply with the normativity of the capital system, with the condition of being “upright citizens”. From the analysis of Vagos y Maleantes (1933-1970) and Peligrosidad Social (1970-1995) codes and laws, the projects examines how both laws addressed the topics of gender, race and social class by trying to manage, regulate and discipline desires and sexual-affective relationships between individuals. In Gasol’s works the archive, the installation, the performatic and audivisual documents mix together. His works come from an intersectional space that unfolds as an artistic-medical-scientific document as many voices were not just studied and displayed as the paradigm of the “not being” and, therefore, “what to be”, but rather their existences were turned into pathologies, which tried to be corrected via treatments, therapies or even imprisonments within a system of social and political control.
Ever since the approval of the Vagos y Maleantes Law by the Cortes of the Second Republic, known as La Gandula, they wanted to legislate and control a social mass composed of homeless, nomads or other life forms, with the objective of preventing “antisocial” behaviours through correction treatments via fines or concentration camps. Later on, the Francoist military occupation would maintain the law through its ideological-legislative purification after some modifications, replacing it with the Ley de Peligrosidad Social (1970) until its abolition in 1995. Both laws are sustained on the 19th century ideological current of Social Hygiene Movement which, under the pretence of maintaining specific health standards in the cities, was used to catalogue, neutralise and homogenize a bourgeoisie society model based on morality, capitalism as the engine of History and the dissident pathologisation that has permeated it to the present day.
Thus, the Vagos y Maleantes law was not one to penalise crimes, but rather it tried to prevent them through criminological currents and scientific practices such as anthropometry, craniology or phrenology, which aspired to identify and classify “dangerous” individuals through “abnormal” somatic and psychological characteristics which needed to be treated and corrected. As a result of the triangulation between science, legislation and religion that make up the great stories of the modern age, the State designed the Vagos y Maleantes and Peligrosidad Social laws as means to discipline, from the exercise of work, dangerous individuals such as agricultural colonies, custody centres or casas de templanza (“therapeutic” asylums) to work with the more than 2400 records opened during the first month alone. With the legislation modification and the religious, social and scientific changes that took place during the validity of both laws, we observe that during the democratic period the number of records was reduced considerably, although, nonetheless, nowadays we still find certain ideological remains in the form of treatments, diagnosis, moral judgements, pathologisations, procedures or other forms of order which deeply condition how we build the so called legitimate knowledge, our ways of operating, connecting and existing. The exhibition expands and contracts, attempting to give us a general overview of how these laws affected most of the country while, at the same time, presenting a specific case from Valencia. Therefore, the project aims not only to serve an amplified view, but also to be an approach to the singularities of each geography within the state.
