From 1976 to 1978, Palestinian artist Samira Badran worked at an UNWRA-run women’s teacher training center in Ramallah, where she taught art to refugees living in adjacent camps. This paper considers three mixed-media drawings she produced during this period, which the artist herself considers “nightmarish;” entitled Twenty-Five Barrels, Jerusalem, and Glass City, these unconventional drawings shed light on the roles of magic and memory in the construction of Palestinian landscapes during the 1970s. Badran’s works do not immediately invoke landscapes, in the traditional sense of the term. The olive trees, orange groves, and sparkling sandstone buildings that populate the contemporaneous paintings of her peers are nowhere to be found in her imaginative, vivid compositions. Instead, Badran creates a world in which machines and everyday materials seem to take on lives of their own. Throughout the dense, intricate drawings, Badran thwarts her audience’s efforts to distinguish between the organic and the mechanical, creating a tangle of hybrid forms that appear simultaneously as creatures, objects, natural formations, and machines. The works share formal preoccupations with bundles and folds of fabric, tightly-wound coils of wire and rope, and pieces of broken machinery, and are populated by the artist’s hybrid creatures. There is a certain futility to them: they feature dwellings that cannot provide shelter, beings that cannot move, machines that do not seem to work. These drawings obey a logic inverse to that of Badran’s Palestinian contemporaries, who depicted the cities, villages, and natural landscapes of Palestine through lenses of longing and hope. They portrayed, realistically, a quasi-mythical Palestine rooted in thousands of years of heritage; their canvases convey a kind of magical thinking, an impossible desire to return to a way of life that had been mythologized in exile and irrevocably altered by occupation. Badran, by contrast, uses a fantastic vocabulary to address the actual landscape she saw before her: chaotic, overpopulated camps where movement was tightly restricted, sanitation was subpar, and resources were scarce. While the landscapes of most of her peers centered and drew from memory, both personal and collective, Badran’s are urgent, immediate responses to the realities of the present as they unfolded before her. This paper puts these innovative, singular drawings in conversation with the more mainstream trends of the era, asking how their divergent constructions of the relationship between fantasy and reality provide alternative perspectives on the place of the landscape in Palestinian political thinking.