About COVID-19 testing entre at a Culture Palace, its visitors and testing from the perspective of the staff conducting the testing

Abstract

This article analyses the structure and operations of a COVID-19 testing centre, which operated at Dresden Palace of Culture (Germany) in 2022. It provides an overview of how the centre’s attendance changed its social and physical structure, and the impact on the test conductor-client relations, also the status the staff had in the society before the pandemic. The article explores the importance of the visitors’ physicality on the organising and the procedure of the testing, and also centre’s client attitudes to the testing. It discusses various barriers to conducting and assessment of the test, and attempts to search for historical origins of the resistance to the pandemic in the collection of the German Hygiene Museum, also focusing attention to the contexts of polio pandemic and art. The conclusion of the article draws attention to the connection between a childish helplessness and a meaningless death at war, described by the writer Kurt Vonnegut, imprisoned in Dresden in 1945, which once again became reality as the client ranks were supplemented by refugees since the beginning of war in Ukraine on 24 February 2022.