Shelf Life
The M’zab Valley, deep in the Algerian Sahara, is renowned for its architecture—curvy white structures built a thousand years ago from sand and clay. On a recent sunny morning, the artist Kader Attia set out to create a model of the M’zab hilltop fortress Ghardaïa for an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Standing in for the adobe of the original was another ancient North African invention: couscous—around seven hundred and seventy pounds of it.