Idéalement située (Ideally Located) is an exhibition that has been devised by a group of students at the École Supérieure d’Art Annecy Alpes (ESAAA) as part of an educational project in partnership with the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain of Geneva (FCAC) and the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Villa du Parc.
In Annemasse’s Parc Montessuit, less than five kilometers from the Swiss border and easily accessible from Annecy, stands a restored 19th-century stately bourgeois residence that boasts 300 m2 of exhibition space spread over five galleries, with an additional veranda and balcony. This is the space that will play host to the artworks making up the cantonal public collection; it is obvious that the space and its configuration are the givens of an exhibition project that consists in shifting artworks around and rehanging them.
Some twenty-five pieces by Swiss and international artists make up this selection from the rich heritage collection that once decorated government offices of the Canton of Geneva. But the signatures on the works are of less importance with respect to letting the works “talk” back and forth in terms of the very way in which art objects create a dialogue with each other and how they reflect the exhibition space. Ideally located then, they offer perspectives, points of view, openings vis-à-vis the interior of a painting, or perhaps beyond the walls. The work of art inside the work of art, caught up in the dizzying play of a mise en abyme, cracks open forbidden doors and windows that look onto another dimension, a twilight zone, where self-referentiality may give way to science fiction. The artwork becomes a surface for projections and simultaneously a space that affords access to an elsewhere.
The location of the plot is calm, however, and aims to welcome visitors, those temporary inhabitants of the exhibition space who indulge in the pleasures of good taste and thought. Devised by art and design students as a visual-arts expression, the elements of the display introduce the hypothesis of a home setting for works of art making up a public collection.

With works by Caroline Bachmann, Stéphane Dafflon, Philippe Decrauzat, Gérald Ducimetière, Sylvie Fleury, Francesca Gabbiani, Mathis Gasser, Vidya Gastaldon, Candida Höfer, Thomas Huber, Stéphan Landry, Louise Lawler, Pentti Monkkonen, Matt Mullican, Dominique Page, Guillaume Pilet, Marta Riniker-Radich, Christian Robert-Tissot, and Dan Walsh.