Cyril Zannettacci — Parler à ceux que l’on n’écoute jamais !
From 23 November 2022 to 31 December 2022
Galerie Le Château d’Eau– 1 place Laganne, 31300 Toulouse
Opening on November 22nd at 6pm
It is in the heart of a care unit for the homeless that photographer Cyril Zannettacci witnesses the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic in 2021. Located in Nanterre, at the gates of Paris, the Centre d’Hébergement et d’Assistance aux Personnes Sans-Abri (CHAPSA), a centre that is unique in France, welcomes and accompanies homeless people in a process of care.
The centre, which looks like an abandoned hospital, has been receiving homeless people since the end of the 19th century. Originally, it was a prison to keep beggars away. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that it became the centre we know today: a place for exiles, precarious workers and women fleeing violence. Not having the same resources or the same reputation as traditional medicine, social medicine suffers from a considerable lack of resources, budgets and staff. Rationing, or even the disappearance of certain hygiene products, dilapidated premises, toilets that have been condemned for months, a night team reduced to one nurse and one care assistant for forty-eight patients…
As head of the medical service, Dr. Valérie Thomas is close to giving up her lab coat: today this hybrid establishment is on the verge of collapse. She deplores not only the “State’s contempt for those who care for the poorest*”, but also the injustice linked to the deterioration of services, which has reached its peak since the epidemic. She “sees, as do her teams, the gap between social medicine and conventional medicine in our health system (…) it is not easy to find subsidies for our public, which has no political weight. It is always easier financially to run a clinic in Neuilly than a centre for the homeless in Nanterre*”.
Each wave of contamination is a new ordeal for the hospital and its reduced staff, who are less and less able to cope with the conditions in which they work. A Covid unit receiving cases infected by the virus during the pandemic had to close the following year because of the insufficient number of nursing staff. On the verge of burnout, those who remain are doing their best to continue care and protect the health of the homeless.
“This is not just any place,” warns a doctor in the canteen. All the problems of the world today are condensed here.” – Cyril Zannettacci
*All quotes are from Romain Jeanticou’s article, L’hôpital de la rue, for Télérama n°3727, 16/06/21
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Hôtel Paul Delaroche
58 rue Saint Lazare, 75009 Paris
+33 1 53 01 85 85
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