Back in 2019, we let the internet pick a surprise destination for our road trip. The randomly selected winning entry was the International Banana Museum, which we somehow thoroughly enjoyed (besides Jen hating all my banana jokes).
But we had a blast on the whole roadtrip and decided that we should, eventually, visit each of the losing entries, too. One of those entries was some place (or was it a thing?) called “Cabinetlandia” in southwestern New Mexico. Later that year, I found myself passing through the area, remembered the entry, and decided to stop by and check it out.
Atlas Obscura offers some quick background
THERE’S AN ODD “LIBRARY” PLOPPED in the desert of New Mexico. Inspired by American artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s site-specific work from 1973 “Fake Estates,” it was meant to poke fun at those businesses and individuals who were at the time buying up acres of land on Mars for their own utopian desert plots.
The strange sight is the work of Cabinet, a New York-based magazine of art and culture that was founded in 2000. In 2003, the nonprofit announced it had acquired of a plot of land in Luna County. The magazine dubbed the turf, over 2,000 miles from its offices in Brooklyn, “Cabinetlandia.”
The library was added in 2004. Essentially, it’s a file cabinet cemented into a concrete arch on the rectangular bit of land. According to its creator, Matthew Passmore, the idea was to “make it look like the cabinet grew naturally out of the landscape; as if, in Cabinetlandia, cabinets are naturally occurring elements of the ecosystem.”
So that description, along with its GPS coordinates, was all I knew about this place upon arrival. I hadn’t really had time to adequately research any of this and didn’t know what to expect when I arrived here, as I just happened to recall the entry during a stop to gas up in nearby Deming, while en route from Phoenix to Las Cruces.
The very first order of business was to pee—finally—which I had wanted to do at the gas station but the restrooms were closed for cleaning. So I parked and wandered a bit out of the “site” to do so, discovering a very unexpected (and conveniently located!) biodegradable toilet in the last place I’d expect one. After that was done, I grabbed my phone and headphones, and investigated the site live on camera.
Here’s what I found:
But wait…there’s a lot more to this story.
And I only learned about it when I started to type this post, five years after my visit. 🤦♂️
After that visit, I did a quick google search hoping to find out a bit more, preferably from the official source: Cabinet Magazine. Instead, my results were littered with various travel blogs and such, who had apparently out-SEO’d the magazine company on its own project. And not too surprisingly, the results I clicked on just seemed to regurgitate the same info from Atlas Obscura. Perhaps that’s about all there was to the story? I didn’t investigate further.
When I started writing this post, I did another quick google search to help remind me of some of the details. And this time, I found the project page on Cabinet. And boy oh boy, I fell down the Cabinetlandia rabbit hole.
Man, what a fun project! I love how this all came together and I will definitely be back to investigate a bit further (I’ll make sure to provide an update here, preferably within five years this time).
A short history of how this came to be
Essentially, Cabinet Magazine had an idea for their “Property” issue in 2003, which results in the purchase of Cabinetlandia in the New Mexico desert (for $325 on eBay), a lease request in Brooklyn, and another purchase on…wait for it…Mars (a steal at only $34!).
The announcement of the project, which is a fun read (and includes a reference to being “un-Donald Trumpable”), elicits two proposals from readers.
One proposal is to allow readers to get in on the land grab action. So Cabinet obliges and offers to license 6700 little sections of it—each literally the physical size of a Cabinet magazine (200mm by 250mm)—to any reader for use through December 31, 2099 at the smoking hot deal of one penny1. Here are the permitted activities, according to the contract:
The Licensee will be permitted to make the following uses of the Property: a) stand upon it on both legs, b) stand upon it on one leg, c) conduct outdated science experiments, d) have sexually innocent fantasies involving cellotape and marshmallows e) think of the color ultramarine, f) write letters to the President of the United States, g) dream of animals that can only be painted with a thin brush, h) erect signs as long as none of the words used contains a “w,” and i) carry out site-unspecific art projects, so long as all applicable laws and regulations are followed.
The other proposal is from a reader who offers to establish a “Cabinet National Library” on the land. Cabinet publishes his proposal, along with his site plan, in a subsequent update on the project (which also includes a fun origin story for the original parcel partitions: a 1960s-era land scam aimed at Northerners). Well, guess what, the guy actually goes out and builds the damn thing! That is what the file cabinet is: a reader-inspired project.
Of course, Mother Nature soon intervenes, dealing a devastating blow to the young country of Cabinetlandia. That prompted a subsequent invasion in October 2006 by the Land Arts of the American West, some sort of field study program for college students, who saw an opportunity to strike while the country was still in tatters. After successfully repelling the invasion with the (likely, but also unlikely) help of Mother Nature, Cabinetlandia’s National Library was later heroically rebuilt and still stands in a defiant state of only-partial disrepair—or, at least it did when I visited in 2019.
Man, I just love shit like this. If you want to fall down the same rabbit hole I did, see the links below:
The Official History of Cabinetlandia
- The Initial Land Acquisition Project Proposal (Spring 2003)
- New Mexico Land Grab: The Partitioning and Sale of “Readerland” (Spring 2003)
- Update No. 1 – Notes from Luna County (Fall/Winter 2003)
- Update No. 2 – Building the Cabinet National Library (Winter 2004-05)
- Update No. 3 – The fall of a DIY empire (Winter 2005-06)
- Update No. 4 – Rebuilding the Cabinet National Library (Fall 2009)
There was also a call for Time Capsule for two rather specific items to be interned in the Cabinetlandia graveyard in 2004 and retrieved a decade later, but I didn’t see any sort of follow up.
- As soon as I discovered this, I immediately printed out the contract and filled it out to participate. Unfortunately, the offer (of course) expired long ago—but shit, I’m still sending in the damn penny anyway. ↩︎