Environment plays a key role in influencing the evolution of galaxies, and clusters provide ‘laboratories’ in which to study galaxy interactions and the effect of environment on these. Meanwhile, the VISTA Magellanic Clouds Survey (VMC) provides a high-resolution near-infrared view covering the Magellanic Clouds and Magellanic Bridge. Due to its high resolution and sensitivity, the VMC also contains information about many background galaxies, most of which have not been captured by past surveys. Therefore, it is now possible to investigate galaxy clusters and groups that would previously have been obscured by foreground stars, providing us with new ‘laboratories’ in which to study galaxy evolution. We use VMC data in combination with data from optical and infrared surveys and new radio continuum images from the Australian SKA Pathfinder to study the evolution of galaxies in clusters and groups. To this end, we map galaxy clusters in the VMC survey using photometric colours and redshift estimates. This allows us to quantify the environments in which background galaxies reside and to study their properties by using near-infrared as a tracer of stellar mass and AGN dust and using radio lobes as a probe of the intracluster medium. We approach the problem of mapping background galaxies in areas of high stellar contamination using an automated method that we intend to be transferrable to other near-infrared surveys that present similar challenges to the VMC, such as those covering the galactic plane of the Milky Way.