RAMALLAH, West Bank — Six long skeletal objects — thin, dark and dried up — hang from the ceiling in a small room plastered with maps of Palestine. These dried pieces of cactus, strung together and hung by thick black thread, cast dark shadows on the maps. The dark, shadowy and slightly eerie installation by Rana Bishara, aptly called “The Roadmap of Elimination,” is part of “Intimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape,” the current exhibition at the Palestinian Museum, in Birzeit.

“The cactus has always been part of the natural landscape in Palestine,” Bishara told Al-Monitor. “[It] has been used to fence our agricultural lands and villages for decades.”

Bishara further explained that after the Nakba – “the catastrophe,” the dispossession of the Palestinians with the establishment of Israel in 1948 — the cactus became a symbol of the Palestinians' destroyed and abandoned villages — a “witness of the destruction and suffering” — as well as a symbol of Palestinians' steadfastness in trying to hold on to their homeland.

Bishara said the dried cactus also represents the visual and psychological distortions that Palestine has experienced. For example, she pointed out, the separation wall and the settlements have eliminated all sorts of social and geographical bonds.