Artist captures how summer heatwaves hit Paris and its homeless so hard

As Paris emerges from months of oppressive heat, cooler autumn temperatures are welcomed back like a long-lost friend. But images of France’s hottest summer remain etched in memories — and in the artwork of illustrator Marina Antonova.

Paris is admired worldwide for aesthetic beauty, but the city kept hitting the news for another reason in recent months as record-breaking highs climbed beyond 40°C on the roasting streets.

In a series of drawings called Chronicles of a Heating Planet , Antonova has captured a city under intense heat stress and how this affected the homeless in particular.

“The heatwave made it so much worse,” Antonova said in a recent interview at the Paris flat where she drew much of her work. “Usually winter is the hardest part for homeless people; now we have a situation where both winter and summer are horrific.”

Her drawings show homeless people clinging to their knees, hunched forward in despair, or curled up on pavements in apparent defeat.

“It was such a contrast, people working in posh air-conditioned offices and homeless people sleeping in front of those offices,” Antonova, 37, said. “I cannot imagine how people survived.”

Antonova has had to keep moving from temporary accommodations since arriving in France four years ago from Russia. Though friends helped, she was often coping with living under bad conditions, with mental stress and little money.

The acute suffering of the homeless resonated with her, and she felt anguish at not being able to help them more.

In winter, blankets can at least add warmth, but how do you remove heat when the body suffers all day and night-time temperatures are excruciatingly high? “You bring them water and ice, but it never stops,” said Antonova, who captured the bullying behaviour of an “overpowering sun” through her choice of colour.

“In my images there is a lot of yellow, an acid colour,” Antonova 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.”

Some of her other drawings show animals disorientated in burning forests. Deer even run toward fire because, whichever way they go, there is no escape. Nature is thus upheaved.

“What happens to beauty when the landscape itself turns hostile?” Antonova asks. “Wildfires burnt 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.

France recorded at least 7,200 more deaths than usual during successive heatwaves this year, according to the national public health agency, based on statistical modelling using data from previous years.