Massimo Sirelli, the reuse artist who creates robots from old, discarded objects.

Sirelli was born in Catanzaro in 1981 and was introduced to art at an early age: he says his father, an art enthusiast, took him to galleries, restoration workshops, and antique shops as a child. But the real turning point came during his adolescence, in the 1990s, when he discovered graffiti and hip-hop culture . At around 14, he began painting on walls and train cars, finding in the streets a way to express what was inside him.

Street art thus became his first school: it taught him to look at the city differently. Graffiti, advertisements, abandoned objects, street furniture, and trash ceased to be mere backdrops and became creative material . On his widely followed and constantly updated Facebook page , Sirelli introduces himself as follows: "I am an artist who combines the anger and instinct of graffiti with the clean rationality of graphic design."

This seemingly complex task, Sirelli succeeds well thanks to an artistic choice he made: creating small robots from the scraps he collects. A Corn Flakes can, an aluminum cookie tin, tuna cans. But also pieces found at flea markets or in cellars being emptied. From junk to the remains of a now-unusable appliance.

The robots created by Sirelli join an online family: through a website called Adopt a Robot, each one has a name and a complete profile, including their anatomical characteristics, from measurements to the materials used by the artist. And each one can be adopted by a parent who shares the art of reuse and the fight against waste.

Over the years his works have reached important contexts: in 2015 he exhibited Robot at the Villa Reale in Monza and his Toyssimi at the Triennale Design Museum ; in 2018 a large exhibition dedicated to his robots, Teneri torni , was hosted at the MARCA in Catanzaro.

And he continues to intertwine art and territory. One example is “My Calabria is beautiful,” a large-scale visual project consisting of over 200 drawings, installed at Lamezia Terme airport in 2021. In February 2025 , Sirelli was the protagonist of the Adopt a Robot project at the Bicocca Village in Milan . The public could bring unused objects—coffee pots, tin cans, old tools, telephones, watches, etc.—which would become part of a new work. The initiative culminated in Robot in Love , a live art performance with robots over three meters tall. And in May 2026 , the most important exhibition dedicated to Sirelli's robots ever held in Calabria was held at Palazzo Mazza Borgia 1847 , in Borgia, in the province of Catanzaro, with over 80 works : robots, hybrid creatures, imaginary machines, and assemblages made from recovered materials.