Increased transnational and cross-cultural exchanges raise questions about the enduring meaning of site, locality, and rootedness. Media art’s ability to animate architecture offers provocative ways of reclaiming urban narratives and site-specificity. In Poland, such interventions into the urban landscape pluralize history and challenge the institutionalized narratives of cultural memory in order to rebuild the civic identity needed for a democratic politics. Aleksandra Polisiewicz’s (aka Aleka Polis) Wartopia and Rafal Jakubowicz’s Swimming Pool and Es Beginnt in Breslau use different media to explore forgotten or repressed local urban histories in attempts to resist the "collective amnesia" that has marked postsocialist attitudes toward the recent past. The ephemeral nature of these projects creates piercing mediations and juxtapositions between past and present, revealing the continuing importance of memory and history in processes of Polish self-enfranchisement. These are not nostalgic historical markers but rather meaningful assertions of locality in the face of cultural globalization and the isolation and alienation of a-historical and placeless communities.