Andorra Land Art — programmed as L'ANDART from 2019 and known across its first two editions as the Biennal Internacional d'Andorra — is the biennial of land art and contemporary landscape practice of the Principality of Andorra, the Pyrenean microstate of roughly eighty thousand inhabitants set between France and Spain along the eastern Pyrenees. The institution was founded in 2015 under an organisation initialised ALA 2015, with curator Pere Moles, who had developed the project from 2012; the art directorship has been held across the editions to date by Albert Gusi. The biennial is convened by the Government of Andorra Ministry of Culture together with the Commune of Sant Julià de Lòria, Andorra Tourism, FEDA, Andorra Telecom and the Sorigué Foundation, the consortium of public and private sponsors that sustains the programme.
The sixth edition opens on 19 September 2025 and closes on 14 November under the title Pausa per continuar. The thesis the edition advances — that the first quarter of the twenty-first century has been characterised by an accelerating set of cultural, economic and environmental transformations, and that the present moment calls for a deliberate critical pause across questions of urban growth, public policy and the sustainability of cultural-economic models — is articulated as both an artistic and a civic argument: a stocktaking that the institution invites the artist and the visitor to undertake jointly, across the mountain landscape of southern Andorra and the historic urban fabric of Sant Julià de Lòria. The programme assembles seventy-eight artists from twenty nationalities and sixty-three works across sculpture, installation, video, photography and site-specific projects, with Liechtenstein — the German-speaking Alpine microstate of roughly forty thousand inhabitants, brought into the programme through cooperation with the Andorran Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Visarte Liechtenstein — as the edition's guest country.
An institution that maps a country onto a contemporary practice
The structural argument the biennial makes in its founding statement — that the institution is engaged in the construction of a contemporary landscape, a reinterpretation of place, region and country through artistic intervention, where the work is inserted into the territory with a set of aesthetic codes much as a tattoo is inserted into the human body — gives the programme its distinctive editorial position within the European biennial circuit. The land-art reference is direct: the institution takes the historical land-art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s as its working tradition, but the Andorran programme departs from the American Western desert that anchored the founding land art of Smithson, Heizer and De Maria, and from the British landscape lineage of Long and Goldsworthy, to insist that the Pyrenean mountain valley — small, populated, juridically singular as a co-princedom under French and Episcopal Co-Princes — is itself a continuing curatorial subject. The first edition in 2015 staged work across the parishes of the principality, with a particular concentration at the Parc Natural de Sorteny in Ordino. The second edition (2017) was organised across four exhibition axes — the Path of Human Rights, the Wool Factory, the Viewpoints and the Zona Ras pedagogical-mediation site at Lake Engolasters. The third edition (2019) carried the rebranding to L'ANDART under the theme Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing), concentrated in the forested area around Lake Engolasters. The fourth edition (2021) opened to the question "What if we had to confine ourselves to the mountains?", a pandemic-era programme of forty-eight works around Engolasters and the Central Park of Andorra la Vella.
The fifth edition in 2023, titled The Mountains in Circulation, made Sant Julià de Lòria the host parish and took as its principal indoor venue the former CATSA tobacco factory in the Les Arades area — a disused industrial space that had operated as a tobacco factory and, from 2011 to 2016, as the headquarters of the Sabors i Aromes cooperative for the promotion of the Andorran trumfa potato and medicinal plants. The recovery of the abandoned factory as the institutional centre of the biennial was made the explicit symbolic argument of the edition: the circular economy of materials, of buildings and of cultural attention. The guest country was San Marino, the Italian-peninsula republic that is the world's other long-standing microstate biennial-eligible cultural partner. The sixth edition has retained Sant Julià de Lòria as the host but moved the indoor centre of gravity to the historic Hotel Pol — a 1931 building that across the twentieth century housed refugees from the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, served as a social and political meeting point for the parish, and now reopens as the institutional anchor of L'ANDART 25, its rooms, corridors, kitchen and common spaces transformed into the galleries of a single building-wide contemporary art exhibition. The Panoramic Route — thirty-five kilometres long, with eleven works installed at sites including Plaça del Solà, Coll de Jou, Fontaneda, Canòlich, Bixessarri and Aixovall — extends the programme out into the wider mountain landscape, a three-hour walking-and-driving itinerary that operates as the institution's open-air museum.
