Hack₂O

Who we are!

This our story !


What we carry on:


Hack₂O is a place for people who see water as a political issue to meet, share experiences and knowledge and get organised.

Hack₂O Water Hackivists training on Seed Bioasay to investigate ecotoxicity in samples from rivers
  • Visibility for local actions taken by those most affected, as well as connections between different groups and activities
  • Facilitation of meetings and discussions between individuals and communities worldwide -- multilingual forum service.
  • Documentation space, open to anyone interested, to make the knowledge, techniques, strategies, and methods of various local communities accessible and to maintain them as a commons

From 2020 to now…


In 2020, an animal slaughtering plant was the source of an accident in a watershed. The vats used to hold the animals' blood at the plant spilled their red contents into the streams of the tributaries of the Vilaine river, which flows through Brittany's capital a few kilometres away.

Members of the Kaouenn Noz biohackerspace and other residents decided to get together and take action as a citizens' assembly.

Hack2Eaux (hack 2 water in French) is launched! Pollution clean-up, sampling of water and soil, plants and small animals for investigation and archiving, water analysis training, open debates in ‘Third-Places’, security training, digital hygiene and self-protection workshops, OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), dataharvesting, direct mutual aid, etc.

It was a grassroots movement with workers, farmers, factory workers, hackers, children, scientists, local associations and so on. Researcher Sylvia Fredriksson helped transcribe this into "Taking hold of everyday life in a catastrophic world" (in french) audio documentation.

From later roots to swarming


To do this hactivist action assembly, we have drawn on our past experience and knowledge acquired both locally and internationally. Rennes city Economic Biennial 2016, Investigation along the coastline and the development of free licensed and open source underwater robots, several years of collaboration with Exposing The Invisible (& Tacticaltech Tech), also contribution with Public Lab, some Trans Hack Exploration Workshops, Research on Seed Bioessay within water and soil pollution etc.
After these events in Rennes, Brittany, which were no more than a mere echo of a longer and more serious state of affairs: We, petites singularités ASBL, have chosen to give a federated and autonomous existence and commitment to the Hack2o project.

Now


In 2023, we we held two 3-day workshop sessions with undocumented people, migrants, refugees, apprentice investigators. In 2024, we did an international meeting in Brussels during OFFDEM festival. In June 2024, we are opening Hack₂O Community Forum