Marika Vandekraats ~ Keywords: settler colonialism, extractions, archival, strawberry, birling, digging

Marika Vandekraats (she/her) is an artist from the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. Her research focuses on the human entanglements tied between nature and capital to frame extractivist processes that have irreversibly affected the climate.

Her research takes shape her collaborative publication about the strawberry, bringing attention to its colonial history and its present exploitations, entitled The Colonial, Familiar, Nostalgic, Radical, Transformative Life of the Strawberry (HumDrum Press, 2024). Beyond text, Vandekraats has worked in programming and curation through her nomadic library project, Reading Room Rotterdam (2023-25) The library functioned as a gathering agent for communities to entangle with one another, and for knowledge to be disseminated through collective gardening, dinners, haircuts, and sharing of texts.

Vandekraats regularly collaborates with friends in text, performance, video, and workshops to practice forms of solidarity and collective resistance against structures of oppression with the exaltation of friendship.