  Taking advantage of the competition between elasticity and capillarity has
proven to be an efficient way to design structures by folding, bending, or
assembling elastic objects in contact with liquid interfaces. Elastocapillary
effects often occur at scales where gravity does not play an important role,
such as in microfabrication processes. However, the influence of gravity can
become significant at the desktop scale, which is relevant for numerous
situations including model experiments used to provide a fundamental physics
understanding, working at easily accessible scales. We focus here on the case
of elastic ribbons placed in two-dimensional bubble columns: by introducing an
elastic ribbon inside the central soap films of a staircase bubble structure in
a square cross-section column, the deviation from Plateau's laws
(capillarity-dominated case dictating the shape of usual foams) can be
quantified as a function of the rigidity of the ribbon. For long ribbons,
gravity cannot be neglected. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis of the
ribbon profile, taking into account capillarity, elasticity and gravity. We
compute the total energy of the system and perform energy minimization under
constraints, using Lagrangian mechanics. The model is then validated via a
comparison with experiments with three different ribbon thicknesses.
