Le Diatope de Iannis Xenakis, vu par le plasticien Bruno Rastoin

Initially created for the inauguration of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1978, Iannis Xenakis’s Diatope is perhaps his most accomplished multimedia creation, combining music, written text and architecture as well as a visual spectacle. For the first time in his Polytopes (the large-scale luminous-musical shows beginning with the Polytope de Montréal in 1967), Xenakis also designed an architectural structure conceived to be easily dismantled and remounted. The archives of the Centre Iannis Xenakis (CIX) reveal this extraordinary experience through the eye of photographer Bruno Rastoin (1954-2020) and his collection of images that trace the design, construction and creation of this unprecedented show.

On the occasion of the centenary of Xenakis’s birth in 2022 and in the context of the Meta-Xenakis commemorations, the CIX invited students from the Master’s program in Musicology at the Université de Rouen Normandie to take part in the curation of an exhibition that retraces the creation of the Diatope: writing the wall texts, selecting the images from the CIX archives, their online editorialization, cataloguing these resources, copyright management—these are some of the aspects addressed in this research-action project.