Music for the Soul

This visual account portrays the journey of Música para el Alma (MPA), an NGO made up of professional musicians who offer symphonic concerts in hospitals, nursing homes and prisons.

Entering this universe means being captured by the abundance each photograph offers, in its details, in its backgrounds. In the unconventional space of a hospital waiting room or a dialysis unit, as if portraying a war zone, the eye of photographer and sociologist Agustín Benencia delivers a poetics of the everyday in hard places, thresholds where life and death converse —a poetics sustained from the first photograph to the last. These visual compositions convey a memory, that of having been there, resonating with violins, cellos, tenors and sopranos, among IV drips and appointment calls. Opening it on any page is keeping that memory forever.

Música para el Alma, photographs by Agustín Benencia, includes a prologue by Adriana J. Bergero, texts by María Teresa Andruetto and Sol Triano, and editorial design and production by Silvina Simondet of Karlova Editora.

The project: Silvina Simondet, editor at Karlova Editora and SK/Branders' partner for editorial projects, joined the wonderful team of the NGO Música para el Alma with the mission of giving shape to Agustín Benencia's profound visual work of more than 10 years.

What began as a photographic survey became a sensitive and visually powerful editorial work, which perfectly portrays love for one's neighbour through art, music, image and connection with life.

Karlova worked on the editorial script, texts and images, visual production and printing.

The book can be downloaded free as a PDF, bought online, or obtained by attending MPA's concerts.