France recorded at least 7,200 more deaths than usual during successive heat waves this year, according to the national public health agency, and the damage is still visible in Paris through Marina Antonova’s drawings of homeless people collapsing under record-breaking heat. The city is emerging from months of oppressive temperatures, but the summer’s highs, which climbed beyond 40 C (104 F) on Paris streets, have left a brutal mark on those with nowhere to go.
Heat as a Weapon of Class Life
Antonova’s series, called “Chronicles of a Heating Planet,” shows homeless people clinging to their knees, hunched forward in despair, or curled up on pavements in apparent defeat. She told The Associated Press that “the heat wave made it so much worse.” Her line about the seasons says plenty without needing a lecture from any ministry: “Usually winter is the hardest part for homeless people; now we have a situation where both winter and summer are horrific.”
That’s the reality the polished city doesn’t advertise. Antonova said, “It was such a contrast, people working in posh air-conditioned offices and homeless people sleeping in front of those offices.” The image is almost too neat in its cruelty. Climate breakdown doesn’t arrive evenly; it lands hardest on people already pushed to the pavement by housing markets, wages, and the usual bureaucratic indifference that calls itself governance.
Antonova, 37, said she could not imagine how people survived. She has had to keep moving from temporary accommodations since arriving in France four years ago from Russia. Friends helped, she said, but she was often coping with bad living conditions, mental stress, and little money. The artist’s own instability runs through the work, not as a side note but as part of the same social order that leaves some people in air-conditioned offices and others under an “overpowering sun.”
Fortress Comfort, Street-Level Suffering
In winter, blankets can at least add warmth, Antonova said, but heat is different. “How do you remove heat when the body suffers all day and night-time temperatures are excruciatingly high?” she asked. “You bring them water and ice but it never stops.” That’s the thin edge of charity in a city built for comfort elsewhere. Water and ice. Not shelter. Not housing. Just enough to keep the crisis visible and manageable.
Antonova said she captured the bullying behavior of the sun through color. “In my images there is a lot of yellow, an acid color,” she said. “Usually you associate the sun with something nice, this year it was very different for everyone. It felt very aggressive and dangerous, there were also fires around the country.” Her drawings of animals disorientated in burning forests carry the same message. Deer even run toward fire because, whichever way they go, there is no escape.
Wildfires burned across southern Europe and then, in a place long thought safe from them, at the edge of Paris itself. In July, fire swept through the forest of Fontainebleau. A historic fire devoured forests near Bordeaux, with legions of people forced from their homes. Italy, Spain and other European countries experienced extreme temperatures in the world’s fastest-warming continent. The continent’s rulers keep talking about management, resilience, and adaptation. The ground-level result is people fleeing flames and heat while the institutions that preside over the mess keep their distance.
Anti-Postcards From a Burning City
Antonova said her series asks what everyday life looks like when climate change is no longer a prediction but a permanent condition. “These paintings are not illustrations of a single event,” she said. “They are observations of a future that has already arrived.” That future is already here for people sleeping outside, and Paris is just one of the places where the city’s postcard image has started to rot in the heat.
She called the work “anti-postcards.” Her artist friend in Russia, after seeing the drawings, told her, “Oh thank you, I will never go to Paris after this.” Antonova said, “We called this series ‘anti-postcards.’ The kind of postcards where you don’t want to go to the place. It’s a kind of sad joke.” There’s a bitter clarity in that joke. The tourist city, the office city, the city of polished surfaces and expensive interiors, all of it depends on the people outside being kept out of sight.
Antonova said future heat waves could even dissuade people from queuing at the city’s tourist destinations. “In five or 10 years Paris could get so hot people might not want to go here, not in summer, anyway,” she suggested. “My series about the heat wave gave me the opportunity to look at very familiar places with a new angle,” she added. “To rethink the tourist attractions in a more sinister and dangerous atmosphere.”
She drew on an iPad, often from photos taken on her phone in different parts of the city. Since becoming an immigrant, she said, it was difficult to organize studios every time she moved, so she started working more with digital illustration. “Usually I wouldn’t do drawings about something on the news because I would need a longer time to process and create the painting. Ipad gives you the immediacy because it’s so much faster,” she said.
That immediacy matters. The heat didn’t wait, and neither did the deaths. The city didn’t stop for the homeless, and the summer didn’t stop for anyone.