“…For open curves, the stability of post-buckling elasticae is even now a central issue (see e.g. [34,40,59,74,77] and references therein). More recently, basic properties of elastic networks are investigated [24,23]: Along the way it is confirmed in [24] that a global minimizer in a "drop" setting (l = 0 and θ 0 , θ 1 not fixed) is the half figure-eight and thus unique up to rotation.…”