It is at the heart of a care unit for the homeless that the photographer Cyril Zannettacci witnesses in 2021, the surge of the Covid-19 epidemic.
Located in Nanterre, at the gates of Paris, the Center for Accommodation and Assistance to Homeless People (CHAPSA), a unique place in France, welcomes and supports homeless people in a care process. With its air of an abandoned hospital, the center has been welcoming homeless people since the end of the 19th century. Not having the same resources or the same reputation as conventional medicine, social medicine suffers from a considerable lack of resources, budgets and staff. Rationing, even disappearance of certain hygiene products, dilapidated premises, WCs condemned for months, night team reduced to a nurse and a caregiver for forty-eight patients…

At the head of the medical service, Dr. Valérie Thomas is on the verge of giving up her blouse: today this hybrid establishment is on the verge of rupture. She deplores not only the “State contempt for those who care for the poorest”, but also the injustice linked to the degradation of services reaching its climax since the epidemic. She “sees well, like her teams, the gap that separates social medicine from 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 center for the homeless in Nanterre”.