SALVAGE
A Festival of Regenerative FUTURES
Materials. Buildings. Neighborhoods. Traditions. Ideas. Stories. People. Possibilities.
Durham has always been a city of transformation. Tobacco warehouses became innovation districts. Historic mills became thriving neighborhoods. Black Wall Street put Durham on the map a century ago and has inspired entrepreneurs for decades. Artists, entrepreneurs, educators, scientists, and community builders have spent decades reimagining what this city can become. Regeneration isn't just part of Durham's past ‒ it is Durham's instinct.
SALVAGE is a festival built around that instinct. Created by The Scrap Exchange ‒ Durham's beloved, proudly weird home for creative reuse for over 35 years ‒ SALVAGE explores how creativity can transform what has been discarded, overlooked, or broken into new forms of value. But SALVAGE isn't just about stuff. It's about communities, cultures, systems, and ideas. It asks a question that matters urgently right now: What could we love again?
The festival’s inaugural theme, Love It Again, celebrates the belief that value is not fixed. Through imagination, collaboration, and creativity, things that appear to have reached the end of their usefulness can begin entirely new lives.
SALVAGE positions Durham as a national center for regenerative creativity and future-making while generating tourism, supporting local businesses, elevating local talent, and strengthening community connections. It is designed not only as a cultural experience, but as a long-term economic development strategy—one that attracts visitors, supports local businesses, generates tourism spending, and strengthens Durham’s identity as a destination for creativity and innovation.
TOP VIDEO: North Carolina choreographer Renay Aumiller performs “Release Me” wearing an interactive costume of grocery store bags.
The Trashion Show: Beloved Durham drag queen Stormie Daie is both MC and curator of this regional showcase of circular fashion, wearable art and future textiles. DancePerformance: “Release Me” by choreographer Renay Aumiller (wearing an interactive costume of grocery store bags). Material Labs: Interactive exhibitions and workshops where visitors explore creative reuse, fabrication, repair and emerging materials. Hands-on. Messy. Transformative. Future Commons: Visitors contribute plastic bottles and cans and other found objects to a large-scale installation that spells out “SALVAGE” in the RAD parking lot. Youth Futures Challenge: Student teams present ideas, prototypes and solutions that address real community challenges. Mongo's Parade of Possibilities: SALVAGE's signature opening procession is led by Jhegetto and inspired by the Second Line tradition ‒ a joyful, theatrical, community-built celebration of imagination and transformation. SALVAGE Nights: Music, performance, projection art and immersive evening experiences throughout Durham. The festival's nights are as essential as its days. The Regenerative Futures Forum: A growing thought-leadership track featuring national voices from design, sustainability, innovation, education, entrepreneurship and culture. Table Scrap Competition: The best and scrappiest four-person place settings. Trash Bouquet Contest: Floral arrangements that will never die. Trashion Market: Throughout the Reuse Arts District (RAD) in the historic Lakewood Shopping Center, artists sell their fashion-based wares made of Scrap materials. Scrap Terrazzo Garden Collection: a new product line of garden benches and stepping stones made of cement mixed with glittering, smashed-up trash diverted from landfills (and made from demolition waste scooped up after SmashFest).
Signature Experiences
Stormie Daie performs
in downtown Durham.
Terrazzo bench made from recycled materials.
Why Durham? Why now?
Few cities are better positioned to host SALVAGE. Durham combines world-class research universities, a thriving innovation economy, a vibrant arts community, historic neighborhoods with bones worth saving, entrepreneurial energy, and a civic culture that knows how to get things done. Our city's story is one of continual reinvention.
SALVAGE reflects and amplifies that identity. The festival offers visitors an experience that could happen nowhere else: a celebration of regenerative futures rooted in Durham's unique blend of creativity, innovation, authenticity, and community.
But Durham is also at a pivotal moment. The Scrap Exchange has watched Durham double in population and watched its skyline stretch upward. New residents arrive every day. New buildings reshape familiar streets.
The question facing Durham is no longer simply how we grow—it is how we grow while maintaining the creativity, connection, authenticity, and sense of belonging that make Durham special. SALVAGE is designed as a response to that challenge: a festival that helps residents and visitors imagine Durham’s future together.
At the same time, the world is hungry for what SALVAGE offers. Communities everywhere are searching for new approaches to environmental sustainability, economic resilience, and civic engagement. There is no major annual event that lives specifically at the intersection of creativity and regenerative futures. SALVAGE can own that space. Durham can own that space.
There is no SXSW for regenerative creativity. Not yet. SALVAGE intends to become exactly that ‒ and Durham is the best city to pull it off.
Our Aspiration
The Scrap Exchange has spent more than three decades proving that discarded materials still hold extraordinary value. SALVAGE extends that conviction to communities, culture, and the future itself.
We have watched Durham double in size. We have watched the skyline change and the neighborhoods evolve. We have watched our own organization grow from a scrappy, beloved curiosity into something with real reach and real potential. And we have come to believe that the same creative instinct that makes our stores and programs work ‒ the refusal to accept that something is finished just because someone threw it away ‒ is exactly what the world needs right now, at scale.
Sustainability without creativity produces guilt. Creativity without sustainability produces spectacle. SALVAGE is where they become something more than the sum of their parts: a genuine vision of what comes next, made visible, made tangible, made joyful.
Our aspiration is simple: to become the nation's leading annual festival exploring creativity as a force for regeneration ‒ and in doing so, help make Durham one of the most innovative, welcoming and inspiring destinations in America.
