As the leader of a meeting place for young people from all over Jakarta, Ahmad Romero Comacho never runs out of ideas. The CEO of M Bloc Space, who is fondly known as Popo, learned to draw creative ideas from graffiti art to express himself.

Met SUAR on the sidelines of the Bright Society Fest event in Jakarta on Saturday (12/13/2025), the 35-year-old enthusiastically shared the inspiration and philosophy he has gained from his hobby of applying various colors to blank canvases.

For Popo, graffiti, the creative industry, and young people are closely related.

"The world of art is a hobby that I have developed since I was a child. Perhaps it's because I am surrounded by people who are explorative, whose world is not far from art," said Popo, beginning his story to the SUAR Team.

Popo has been pursuing his talent for drawing since elementary school, which has led him to participate in various drawing competitions. He has won first place many times.

Not limited to drawing on canvas, Popo's encounter with pop culture while sitting in junior high school opened up new horizons. From the street culture that developed in the United States in the 1980s, Popo became acquainted with skateboarding, break dancing, and graffiti.

"Coincidentally, all three were in the same environment, namely pop arts such asskateboarding, break dancing, and graffiti, and they were still friends, you know. Due to the influence of pop culture entering Indonesia, the three of them formed an environment that had its own language," he said.

No one would have guessed that the pop hobby that became the obsession of teenagers in the early 2000s would bring Popo together with friends who shared the same passion. Not only from Indonesia, but also from abroad.

"It's not nationwide anymore, but global. I really got to know graffiti artists from the US and Europe, just because of graffiti. We come from different places, but we speak the same language, which is graffiti. That's where we meet, and from that collective of artists, I learned that there is a whole industry that interests me in the creative economy," he explained.

Unquenchable

Coming from a family with an entrepreneurial background encouraged Popo to become a young entrepreneur after graduating from college. Unfortunately, Popo's first business was forced to close down less than a year later.

After failing to start a business, Popo chose a professional career at an automotive company as a sales marketer for automatic motorcycles. He had to market one of the automatic motorcycle product variants targeting young people.

"When I was entrusted with sales at a dealership in Tegal, I created a marketing activity by holding a graffiti competition. It turned out that the graffiti artists who came were not only from Tegal, but some also came from as far away as Cirebon. From there, it turned out that the market share increased because the brand value of the motorcycles I was selling was in line with sales," he said.

Experimenting with unconventional marketing methods, Popo often encountered the challenge of finding a suitable event organizer capable of handling the marketing events he had conceptualized.

That challenge then prompted him to establish a small event organizer with a number of friends focused on creative events in 2019, which became the forerunner of TEAMUP Creative Community Business Ecosystem.

With the grand vision of becoming a creative business ecosystem, TEAMUP collaborates with many mural and graffiti artists to add a touch of color to the places it builds, including M Bloc Space.

From twelve years of professional experience in the automotive industry, Popo has learned many lessons, including about the creative industry ecosystem.

Recognizing that the creative industry relies on the power and novelty of ideas, graffiti and murals have become more than just leisure activities; they are also opportunities for brainstorming.

"Because we come from the community,the value weholdisnot to createactivationconceptsbased onassumptions orfeelings, but through the eyes of the perpetrators, we canbreak down the strategyto its roots. The collaborative work with graffiti artists became my spirit at TEAMUP, which manages M Bloc Space, among other things," said Popo.

Popo now leads six subholding companies and nine core companies that share a common thread of community engagement, digitalization, and creative space.

As a result, TEAMUP's touch through Ruang Riang Millenial, which manages M Bloc Space, has successfully restored the glory of the Blok M area as a creative space for young people, as well as Urban Forest Cipete and Cibis Park Cilandak.

M Bloc Space is now the epicenter of the creative industry and the most iconic public space in South Jakarta. Located in Melawai, this area successfully connects the city's history with its community.

By embracing the concept of adaptive reuse, old buildings that retain their original architecture have now been converted into a row of local retail stores, artisan coffee shops, and music performance venues that are bustling with activity every day.

Friend to friend

According to him, being an entrepreneur and an artist can go hand in hand in the creative industry.

For an artist, he said, a picture is the embodiment of a graffiti artist's ideas. This makes recognition and appreciation more meaningful than just a transactional matter.

One experience Popo remembers is when he worked on a graffiti mural on a basketball court at the Pamulang Community Center in South Tangerang in 2020.

In this project, TEAMUP collaborated with mural artist Adi Dharma from the Studio Stereoflow collective to turn a basketball court into a giant canvas for colorful murals. When the artwork was completed and shared, it went viral in less than a day.

"At that time, it went viral around the world because we successfully crossed over the art and sports audiences at the same time," he said.

From his network of graffiti artist friends who have been with him since his youth, Popo makes the most of every opportunity and encounter to inspire each other.

Collaboration, mutually respectful cooperation, characterized by an equal division of roles and no interference with one another.

"The artists focus on drawing. But when we take the initiative to organize events and invite them, they welcome us warmly because we are like family. They have creativity, we have managerial skills, so we complement each other," he added.

From graffiti, Popo also discovered the meaning of harmony. The mixture of various colors that form an imaginative image is, in the end, no different from the effort to execute the ideas that fill one's head, while also emphasizing that the most important thing about an idea is not merely its uniqueness, but the ability to turn that idea into reality.

"The harmony of many people and collaboration in the creative industry ecosystem is like mixing colors on a canvas. The combination of various colors is what gives life to a mural and graffiti," concluded Popo.