The memory-forming potential of murals in the communication space of Polish cities

The starting point for my considerations is the definition of collective memory as images of the past activated in social communication resulting from the current needs of a given community. Shaping knowledge about the common past is possible thanks to memory carriers. The development of modern communication methods has expanded the palette of memory carriers, and their selection is increasingly influenced by vulnerability to global cultural trends. The subject of this article is the presentation of traces of the past in the public space in the form of murals. In recent years, murals have gained the status of key publicly available carriers of knowledge about the past in many Polish cities as a result of conscious actions of specific people or institutions. The article attempts to show the memory-forming potential of this kind of multimodal texts in the process of shaping collective memory.