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Recent studies show that an infrared nulling interferometer dedicated to the detection and spectroscopy of exoplanetary systems must fulfill three main requirements. It must provide very strong suppression of the light originating from the target star and good spectral coverage (from 6 to 18 μm) with a fixed baseline and must be able to distinguish planets from local dust disc emission without any ambiguity. We present here a solution with five 1.5 m class telescopes deployed in an elliptical array that meets all these constraints. The telescope array, whose dimensions are about 50 by 25 m, has been optimized so that the exozodiacal emission is strongly extinguished, very weakly modulated by rotation about the line of sight, and concentrated at a few even frequencies. The planet's signal, in contrast, is strongly modulated at many distinctive frequencies. A simple cross-correlation method recovers a single image of a …